


14 Statements (Never Read)

by ladysisyphus, Plooby



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: (with an eldritch being), A Statement Made Them Do It (The Magnus Archives), ANYWAY DEFINITELY NOTHING BAD HAPPENED AFTER THAT!!!, Ace subtype: various?, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, BDSM, Bad BDSM Etiquette, Bathroom Sex, Begging, Body Horror, Bondage, Canon Asexual Character, Consentacles, Do Not Archive (The Magnus Archives), Embarrassment, Exhibitionism, Extremely Soft Ending, F/F, F/M, Facials, Frottage, Hand Jobs, Humiliation, M/M, Masturbation, Multi, Mutual Masturbation, No sheep were harmed in the making of this fic, Oral Sex, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Orgy, Penis In Vagina Sex, Porn, Semi-Public Sex, Set in Episodes 159-160 | Scottish Safehouse Period (The Magnus Archives), Sexually Transmitted Diseases, Sort Of, Spanking, Spiders, THAT'S 2020 FOR YOU, Tentacles, The Beholding Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), The Buried Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), The Corruption Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), The Dark Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), The Desolation Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), The End Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), The Flesh Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), The Hunt Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), The Lonely Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), The Slaughter Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), The Spiral Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), The Stranger Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), The Vast Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), The Web Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), Threesome - F/F/M, Threesome - F/M/M, Threesome - M/M/M, Unbirthing, Under-negotiated Kink, Vaginal Fisting, Vaginal Sex, Voyeurism, Walking In On Someone, actually a lot of "them", actually a lot of statements, but everyone's in their right minds at all points, canon-typical statement content, elias/being a big creep, finally remembered we ought to tag for statement content too, friendly bro handjobs, honestly if I were a trans person in the UK I'd probably be an avatar of the Hunt by now too, i will not make an emily dickinson joke here and you are welcome for that, if we contribute one piece of fanon PLEASE let it be simon fairchild's hot gay grandson, just horny, more characters and tags to be added with additional chapters, more like Overridden By Statements I guess, now THERE'S a tag I never expected to need, pairings we ship entirely because of feral chaos activities on twitter, please do NOT date Lightless Flame cultists, the eye just generally causing ouroboric levels of voyeurism/exhibitionism, the last chapter is anyway, tim stoker saying the words "sexy spiders", workplace health and safety hazards that are very difficult to describe on the form
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-02
Updated: 2021-02-09
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:08:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 87,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27832048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladysisyphus/pseuds/ladysisyphus, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Plooby/pseuds/Plooby
Summary: An anthology of 14 stand-alone vignettes about minor divergences from canon, each caused by Jon's recording a statement that was quite a bit different from usual, and the repercussions thereof.(Chapters move in roughly chronological order through canon, though there are some where timing is vague. We'll be trying for updating once a week until this is done, and tags will be updated appropriately with each new chapter.)Post-statement pairing/character index for reference:-Chapter 1: Jon solo, introducing the format-Chapter 2: Jon/Tim/Sasha or Tim/Sasha+Jon, depending on how you look at it-Chapter 3: Elias being a creep to Jon-Chapter 4: Jon/Tim-Chapter 5: none-Chapter 6: Jon/Martin-Chapter 7: Jon/Tim/Martin-Chapter 8: Jon/Georgie, but in a friendly bro way-Chapter 9: Jon/Martin-Chapter 10: Peter/Elias + Jon-Chapter 11: Basira/Daisy/Jon, or Jon/Daisy + Basira, or Basira/Daisy + Jon, depending on how you look at it-Chapter 12: Jon/Oliver Banks (although with some heavy Jon/Martin stuff)-Chapter 13: Helen is very rudely turned down-Chapter 14: Jon/Martin
Relationships: Basira Hussain/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist/Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Elias Bouchard/Peter Lukas, Elias Bouchard/Peter Lukas/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Georgie Barker/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist/Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist/Tim Stoker, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist/Tim Stoker, Oliver Banks/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Sasha James/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist/Tim Stoker, Sasha James/Tim Stoker
Comments: 70
Kudos: 187





	1. One-Night Stands

**Author's Note:**

> Before we get started, we do want to acknowledge that this was project owes a debt of gratitude to flyingwide's "[Caught in a World with No Shield](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22040290)," which set us off brainstorming in the first place. I.e. "That was great! What if that... but with all the entities? And also nearly all the characters??" *SOUND OF US LOSING OUR MINDS AT GREAT LENGTH FOLLOW*
> 
> Also just fair warning, this WILL involve made-up statements with scary stuff and also with sex, which does presumably have the potential to get rocky for some people. We'll try to give a heads-up for anything egregious, but please be be careful with yourself as needed just in case.

Statement of Anna Nguyen, regarding a series of unusual occurrences during blackouts in her home:

One thing I've always appreciated about where I live is that I never lose power. Where I grew up in Lewisham, we always seemed to have trouble with the electric: it seemed like once every few months or so, whether it was for a few minutes or a few seconds or a few hours, it would cut out. I have so many memories from when I was in school of the television blipping off in the middle of a programme, and the lamps going dark and leaving us with just the daylight through the windows. Or just glow from the lights outside, if it was night. And then my father would stomp around grumbling and getting the torches, and my mum would start worrying if it went on too long that things in the refrigerator would start to go off, and then whenever it came back on we'd all have to go round setting all the clocks right again. I'd never want to go to the toilet or shower while it was going on either, because there were no windows in there, and with the door shut it would be so, so dark. It felt creepy to be in there at all, even for a second. Like my breath was too loud, and the walls were too close somehow.

But really, what I remember most about it is always the quiet. That terrible _quiet_ that settles in right after the electric goes out. Everything sort of whines to a stop, like it's winding down to nothing. And it's only then you realise how much noise all the electrical things in a flat really make, in the background, all the time, where you don't consciously hear them. Until it's all gone, and there's just dark, and... silence.

So they've always been some of my least favorite things, blackouts, and I've always been grateful to not really have them at my flat now. I work in I.T. for University College Hospital, and I've done well enough that I could actually get a place in Bloomsbury, which I was very pleased about. I mean, you're absolutely paying for the location, and the flat itself is honestly pretty dreadful. It's a little box in a cheap new high-rise with no charm or character whatsoever, with walls like paper, and all the cabinets and fixtures look like they were put on in a hurry and a bit off-kilter. Just as little effort and expense as possible put into a place to milk high rents out of people. But whether it's the posh area, or all the schools and hospitals nearby, or something else I don't know, for some reason, the electric has always been one thing that's really stable. My lights never even seem to go dim.

That's part of what made it so strange, what happened. The smallest part, though, I guess.

Around this time last year, the electric went out in my flat one evening. I'd only just come home from work about an hour or two before, and I was cleaning up from dinner when it happened. There was no warning at all: I was stood in the kitchen at the sink scrubbing my plate, and all the lights went out around me. And there was that winding-down sound I remembered so well, of all the different hums going away, and everything going quiet.

For a few seconds I couldn't even react, I was so surprised. This never happened, like I've said, and I couldn't think of any reason why it should start now. It was late spring, and very comfortable outside, so people shouldn't need their cooling or heating going, and I hadn't seen any construction at all nearby. It was just like any other night, as far as I knew. Except now I was in the dark.

Eventually I got my wits about me and at least turned off the sink, and tried to think what to do. I kept hoping it was just one of those momentary hiccoughs, and it would come right back on again, but no matter how long I waited, that didn't seem to be happening. And as I stood there, I started to realise that it seemed _too_ dark, darker even than it should have been in a blackout. It took me a bit to understand why: there was no light coming in through the windows, from the other buildings around me, or the streetlamps. No light at all, in fact. That seemed very odd, and if I'm honest, it was the first thing that really started to scare me, beyond that automatic sinking in my gut that I got when the lights first went. That meant that the outage must have affected a pretty wide area, maybe even the whole neighborhood. And somehow, after all that time without going through this, that thought was just really awful. That everyone in my building, and in all of the buildings on all sides of me, we were all just there trapped in our little boxes, alone in the quiet and the dark.

But I couldn't just stay there, so I started feeling my way out of the kitchenette and toward my bed. I had some big scented candles up on a shelf above it, mostly just for decoration. And because those are some of the only things people can think to give you for holiday gift exchanges and things, apparently, when you're a woman who mostly keeps to herself. I had it in mind that I could put the candles on my coffee table and light them, and at least be able to see a bit. My flat's just the one room, so there wasn't far to go, though I did clip my shin pretty badly on the corner of a chair I forgot was in the way, and I nearly fell over my bed when I got there. It's so hard to judge distances when you're stumbling around in the dark, with your arms stuck out around you like you're on a tightrope or something.

Anyway, once I caught myself after I bumped into the bed, I climbed onto it on my hands and knees, so I could crawl across and get to the shelf. And then I stopped.

I couldn't be sure. It was so disorientating, being totally in the dark, I felt dizzy and like I didn't know quite what angle I was to anything. But it felt like... the bed was tilted. Or, not tilted: _sunken_ , in the middle. Like... the way you can feel that a bed has been pressed down when there's a person lying on it already, even if you're not even near them. Dipping down toward their weight. I'd not felt the weight of somebody else in the same bed as me in quite some time, frankly, but I definitely remembered what it felt like. And it felt warmer than it should have, too, even, once I'd realised that. The duvet should have been cool to the touch, after a whole day left alone, but it was warm under my hands where I'd put them out in front of me. I couldn't see anything at all, everything was pitch black, and the flat had been totally empty not three minutes before when the power had gone out, but... everything I felt said clearly there was someone lying on my bed.

I froze. I had no idea at all what to do for a second, it was just so bizarre. There had to be some sort of explanation, but I couldn't work out what it was yet, and I just hovered there, not moving.

And then I absolutely, definitely felt movement on the bed in front of me. And before I could react, someone put their hands on my waist. I could feel them as plainly as if I'd been able to see the person directly, as clearly as I've ever felt anyone touching me. Two gentle, warm hands reaching up from below to grasp my hips, through the fabric of the dress I still had on from work.

I gasped. Quite loudly, in fact. I was frozen again, but now it was because I was terrified. My heart was racing so loudly I couldn't seem to think. I had no idea how somebody could be in here, but somebody _was_ in here, on the bed with me. Touching me.

It seemed like it took a very long time for me to be able to do anything at all. Finally, I was able to get enough of my breath back to be able to speak, if only barely. I don't even really remember what I said, just something like: "Please don't hurt me. Please just go. I won't make any trouble, we can just forget about it, if you just go."

Whoever it was, though, they didn't say anything. They didn't move, either. Their hands just kept resting on my hips, really very gently. Almost... tenderly, it seemed like. After a moment, they just started to stroke over my hips, just a little bit. Just barely moving the fabric under them.

I... don't really know how to explain how I reacted. I was still really scared, I didn't know what was going to happen, or what to do. I should have pulled away, tried to run away and get to the door, or to the kitchen to see if I could get a knife or something, although I can't imagine that would have gone well in the dark. But the way those warm hands were touching me...

Look, I'm not _crazy_ , all right? And I'm not desperate. I've had a few dates here and there, although I hadn't really seen anyone for a long time at that point. Of course sex is nice, but I could always sort of take it or leave it, to be honest. I can't explain it. But those hands kept stroking my hips, like a lover's really, and in spite of everything I just found myself getting _really_ aroused. Just soaking, like I needed to get off right away or I couldn't stand it. It was bizarre, it made no sense at all, but...

The hands stroked down my hips and thighs, to the hem of my dress. Then they moved past it, and up under it, to touch my skin, and they felt... wrong. I knew they did. They were too solid somehow, all one piece, without any feeling of the separation between fingers or the difference between finger and palm. It was like they weren't really hands at all. But they were warm, and honestly, when they touched my bare thighs I just _moaned_. I was that far gone. They held still a moment, but I didn't get up, I didn't run away, and they started to move slowly up my inner thighs, instead. They pressed them apart a bit, as they got higher, and then they both settled between my legs and started rubbing me, so gently, through my knickers.

I can't believe I'm writing this down. I don't even know how to explain why it was so good, why I was bucking and moaning, on all fours on my bed, just from that. But God, it was. I whimpered when they left off a moment, but they were just reaching up to the waist of my knickers, to pull them down my thighs. I was dripping, by then, just completely mad with it. And I just whispered, "Please."

And then... I don't know. It was so dark, and I didn't really know what was happening anymore. I felt like I was lifted: all the way up off my knees, off the bed, my knickers getting pulled all the way off somewhere along the way. When my knees touched the bed again, I was upright on them, and there was _something_ between them, under me. I had no idea what, but I could just feel it. And the skirt of my dress was being pushed up and held up by something, but also I could feel the hands or whatever they were pulling my hips down, and then there was a mouth on me, between my legs, lapping at my labia and clit with wet sounds that were so loud in that terrible, dark quiet.

Well, I say _a mouth_ , but honestly, I'm really not so sure of that. It did feel like a tongue, sort of. Warm and soft and very slick and wet, and moving like a muscle. But it also felt too long to be a tongue, if I really paid attention. And too dextrous, like it could do things that a tongue couldn't actually do. It kept curling around and waving in ways that just weren't quite right.

Mostly, though, I was not paying attention. I was moaning, and gasping, and squirming on my knees, putting my hands up on the wall for balance just so I could get _more._ I knew full well how thin the walls were and I was sure everyone along the hallway could hear me, but I absolutely didn't care. I was practically screaming almost immediately, it just felt so good. I'd never felt anything like it was doing to me, flicking and licking and sucking at me until I couldn't stand it anymore.

I came quicker than I think I ever have before, wailing and writhing. I didn't have time to do any more than catch my breath, though, before I was being turned over, put on my back on the bed. And then the tongue was back, and it started up again: very delicately, like it knew how sensitive I was, but not stopping. Just immediately going for more, like whoever -- whatever it was, they were as hungry for it as I was.

I think I came three more times, all together, though I'm honestly not sure. I was completely out of my mind by the end, past my limit and still just being sucked and licked and stroked until I finally went again.

I must have passed out eventually, or maybe even just fallen asleep, because I woke up a little after midnight, completely confused. I was lying on my bed, still dressed except for my knickers, which were folded up right next to me. All the lights in my flat were on, which must have been what woke me: when the power came on, they must've still been in the on position. I didn't see anyone or anything out of the ordinary. The room was empty.

My heart was hammering by the time I started being able to think again, though, and I jumped up out of bed and started racing around the flat, looking for anywhere someone might be hiding. Under the bed, in both of my closets, in the toilet, everywhere. There was no one. There was no one there, and I couldn't find any sign anyone ever had been. And after I'd been looking for a few minutes, I noticed the even weirder thing: the chain was still on the door of the flat. I always put it on when I come home, it's not that I don't trust my neighbors but you can't be too careful when you live alone, and it was still set. I couldn't think of any way to do that from outside. I suppose somebody could have got out the window, but that was nearly impossible too: they're the kind that don't even open, really, just sort of tilt out when you turn a crank.

I didn't sleep much that night, as you might imagine. But the next morning, in daylight and with all the lights on besides, it was easier to tell myself that maybe I'd just dreamed it, or something. Maybe even hit my head trying to get the candles, and passed out. I don't know. It just couldn't have been real, so I managed to convince myself it wasn't. I got ready and went to work, though I was very groggy and distracted all day, and by the end I was so convinced that nothing had really happened that I only dreaded going home a little.

I was sat on the couch with my computer that night, though, when it happened again. The lights all going out, the fading sound of everything dying into silence. And then the hands, or not-hands, on my thighs, tugging at the pajamas I was wearing.

This time, though, I managed to have the sense to grab for my mobile. I wasn't thinking straight -- I was already so horny again, honestly, as much as scared, just thinking about what I remembered from the night before and how it had felt -- but I had half the thought I could turn on the torch and actually see who or _what_ it was, and maybe even take a picture. But my mobile was dark when I went to turn it on. It must have run out of battery, though I thought I'd just charged it... and in that moment, it felt more like it had been affected by the blackout, too. That even though it ran off its own power, whatever had turned off everything else could turn off even the things it shouldn't.

So I ended up just clutching it, and finally dropping it, while my visitor got me off over and over again, spread out on the couch with one leg up on the back, practically sobbing with how hard I came. And the same as before, when I woke up the lights were back, and no one was there. But this time, I noticed something I hadn't before.

None of the clocks were wrong. I hadn't even realised in all my panic the night before, but I hadn't had to go round and reset them like we always did when I was growing up. And they were right now, too: they matched my mobile and my computer, when I checked.

This went on for three more nights. The lights going out, the hands, the mouth, coming until I passed out, and then waking up as though none of it had happened. And then the next day was Saturday, so I was home all day, and this time, I decided I was going to be absolutely prepared.

I didn't think a camera or even a torch would work, after what had happened with my mobile. So during the day, I went out and got loads more candles. Dozens of candles, all kinds and sizes. I set them up everywhere, all over my coffee table, my kitchen counter, my nightstand. And as soon as it got dark, long before these things had been happening before, I lit them all up. A part of me couldn't help thinking how it almost looked like I was getting ready for some romantic date.

In a way, I suppose it worked. As it turned out, the lights never went out at all. The candles kept burning, the lights stayed on, and I sat there waiting and practically quivering with anxiety all night, and nothing ever happened. Finally I fell asleep with the candles still going, which was a horrible mistake, I know, but it ended up being all right. They all just burned themselves out or they were in jars or something. I blew them out when I woke up in the night, and that was that.

I did the same thing again the next night, and nothing happened again. Then on Monday, I was tired from work, and I risked not bothering with the candles. Still nothing. It just... stopped, like it had never happened at all.

Is it even weirder if I say that a little part of me was disappointed?

Even so, I probably would never even have bothered mustering myself up to make a statement like this at all, if it hadn't been for the conversation I had with one of my neighbors. We ran into each other at the letter-boxes a few days later, and though I didn't know her name, I knew she lived right on my floor. And she's a much older woman, a very sweet old thing who I'm pretty sure lives on her own, so I asked how she had gotten on in those blackouts we'd had last week. You know, had she been all right?

She looked at me like I'd gone mad. There hadn't been any blackouts last week, she said, she hadn't the slightest idea what I was talking about. In fact, there had never been any blackouts. She'd been living in this building since it was first constructed, seven years ago, and no part of it had ever lost the electric even once.

\------

Statement ends.

\------

Jon sat back in his chair and rubbed an unsteady hand over his face, unseating his spectacles slightly with his fingers up under them. When he'd righted them, he pushed the paper statement away from him across his desk, and considered for only a moment longer before also clicking off the tape recorder. Obviously there hadn't been much in the way of follow-up to do here, and what precious little had been uncovered he could add on to the tape another time. Once he... felt more himself.

Of course he'd realised there was some content of a sexual nature in this particular statement, but that shouldn't have been an issue. It was only a statement, only words on a page, and they were all adults here. Yet somehow -- as with all the others that stubbornly refused to be recorded digitally -- there had been all the world of difference between knowing what it contained, and actually putting it on tape. As deeply embarrassing and frankly professionally ignoble as it was, he couldn't deny that actually speaking the words aloud had profoundly and quite physically affected him. Much as some of the others had left his pulse faster and mouth more dry than he could have readily explained, Ms. Nguyen's statement had caused all that and also an arousal so intense his breath was fast and labored with it, his face hot, all of him barely able to keep still where he sat.

It was all the more baffling for being anything but a familiar condition. He was capable of arousal, certainly, but he'd long since learned it was a much more fleeting and elusive thing for him than it seemed to be for others: difficult to summon on command, difficult to maintain for long, much more manageable by himself than in any sort of collaborative activity. After his first few earnest adolescent attempts with partners had gone badly awry, he'd decided everyone would be better-served by his taking the matter off the table in relationships entirely. Not that he'd had many where it would ever have been an issue.

But what he felt now was something not even comparable to his most intense past experiences of sexual excitement. This was something altogether other: an overwhelming flood of drenching, prickling heat, insistent and desperate, not waning at all no matter how long he sat still and breathed and tried to will it out of him and calm in its place. It felt like he could feel every inch of his skin with unbearable intensity, most of all the stiff peaks of his nipples against his undershirt and his cock throbbing against the slightest graze of his shifting pants and trousers. And much as on the top of his mind he might try to scorn himself for his reaction -- really, it was a _statement_ , just this poor woman trying to excise the fear that her probable delusions during an electrical accident had left behind, not some lurid work of erotica to satisfy his own prurient fascination -- down underneath that... a part of him knew that something wasn't right about it, in the same way that something wasn't right about his experience of the others like it. It was all in how it had felt, to read it. Once again, there'd been that unsettling feeling of sinking into the words, of drifting into some shadowed space beneath their surface where he'd felt more that he _experienced_ than _read_ , with all the while every hair on his skin prickling with the sense of sourceless, unending observation. Only this time, when he'd settled back into himself, it wasn't just the giver's fear that had lingered under his own skin.

But none of that bore thinking about, any more than it ever had before. And he did have a more immediately pressing problem.

It was technically past the end of normal working hours, but not by much. Not to mention that it wasn't as though Martin ever left anymore regardless, and even the others kept rather unpredictable schedules at times. The idea of leaving his office in this condition was entirely out of the question if he couldn't be certain of remaining unseen, and he couldn't. Severe breach of decorum though it was, there was really only one viable option.

Jon staggered up onto legs that felt disconcertingly loose and jellied, and had to pause leaning hard on his desk and pant away the groan that wanted to come out. Even that much shift and stretch of his clothing teased at his aching cock just now, sending shivery ripples of not-enough pleasure out to every corner of him. Good God, was this something other people dealt with _regularly_? If so, he couldn't imagine how they could endure it.

After a moment to catch his breath, though, he managed to make the few stiff-legged steps it took to cross to the door of his office, and firmly lock it. And then, after a moment's consideration, flick off the light switch as well, for good measure. With any luck, if anyone should happen to pass by, it would look as though he'd already gone home.

He dropped heavily back into his desk chair, and took a hard breath. And then snatched a handful of tissues from the box at the edge of his desk, struggled the front of his trousers open, and tugged free the hot weight of his cock.

A wounded sort of breath escaped him as soon as his touch settled around his length, and he leaned his other elbow on the desk, closing his eyes and letting his head hang forward. It wouldn't take long. He didn't need much. Just to reach the peak of this strangeness, and get it out from under his skin, and forget about it as best he could.

Off in the dark of his office, something moved.

Jon's eyes snapped open, his spine jerking up straight. His breath kept coming in fast gasps, his hand barely slowing, as he cast his eyes around, not quite daring to move his head. It was futile anyway, of course: the stripe of light from under the door that was now the only illumination barely penetrated the darkness by a few inches, showing absolutely nothing of what might (or might not) be there. It had only been a whisper of a sound, he reasoned with himself, shutting his useless eyes again, most likely just papers settling, most likely just his imagination, not anything to --

It came again, soft and sly and just at the edge of certainty, as though timed deliberately to taunt him. His breath caught in his throat, shuddered free again only after a few frozen seconds. And still, he couldn't seem to bring himself to stop touching himself, building the heat and need up inside him.

With the lights out, it was all too easy for his mind to conjure a hundred things that could be lurking just beyond where he sat in the uniquely vulnerable act of stroking his cock, from the impossible to the unfortunately likely. Half-panicked thoughts of worms dominated, as well they might -- but he'd just had the light on barely minutes before, and in all of the time the awful things had been appearing around the Institute, they had simply never been seen to move _that_ fast. It was nothing, it _had_ to be nothing, and if his breath was speeding with more than arousal then it seemed to do nothing to dampen the arousal, either, nothing to hold back the edge that was fast approaching.

And yet... if it was nothing, then why should that sense of being watched, of being closely observed in every exposed and cowering inch, be stronger than it had ever been before? Why should it crawl over him like a fever, as though he knew with certainty that _something_ was there, hidden from him by the dark but the dark by no means hiding him from it, its stare boring into him as he worked his hand over his cock and panted into his other muffling palm? And why, for that matter, should that sensation bring him skidding toward the edge faster than ever? Why should it be what at last pushed him right over it with hips jerking hard enough to make the chair creak, and only the handful of tissues clutched fumbling around his cock to protect him?

None of those were questions he had any answer for, nor particularly wanted any. Instead, he only slumped gasping for his breath back into the chair for far less time than he might have liked to, before beginning to hurriedly clean himself up, and put himself back together. When he finally crept shamefacedly out of the office to wash his hands, he didn't turn the light back on as he left, having no particular desire at all to see what it might illuminate. And in the end, he only came back to quickly, gingerishly snatch his jacket and bag back from their places by the door, and head toward the stairs in a rush he couldn't even try in his head to call anything but fleeing.

There was certainly more work he could have done, and more he would surely have to do the next night, and the next. But for right now, all he wanted was to be anywhere but here.


	2. Coming Close

Statement of Ravi Kashyap, regarding a shared misadventure in a suburban funeral home:

Before I start, I don't want to be rude or disagreeable or anything, but I have to make one thing very clear. The person I spoke to at the front said that you could keep these confidential, and I want it understood in no uncertain terms that I'm only giving this statement under that condition. It's not that I'm embarrassed about it -- though all right, I am a bit. I honestly wouldn't even be here if Leah hadn't heard about you all, and insisted we needed to tell _somebody_ about what happened to us. That's not why the confidentiality is so important, though. It's just that we're graduating this term, and I'm very much on the job market right now, and I can't risk it getting back to potential employers that I've done anything illegal.

I mean, it wasn't that big a deal. It wasn't even my idea, I only went along with it because Kevin was so excited. That's my mate Kevin Wilmott, for the record, although I don't want him implicated either. We both grew up in Greenwich and went to school together, and though we went off to different universities we still see each other back home at holidays. That's when this happened, when we were both home this past summer. Kevin had been home the whole time working summer jobs, and I'd just got away from taking a few extra courses over the break. And right away, the same night my train got in, Kevin phoned me up, absolutely out of his mind with excitement, to say we were going breaking and entering.

Kevin's always been... I guess you'd call him a bit of a goth, although he doesn't really dress up for the part. All through school, he was always obsessed with ghosts, and scary stuff, and all the trappings around the idea of death. When we'd hang around being bored teenagers and sneaking drinks and things, he'd always want to go do it in the nearest graveyard in the middle of the night, and maybe try some sort of stupid ritual he'd read on the internet as well. Or if we were hanging round at mine after school sometime, he'd want to put out the lights and get out a Ouija board. Ridiculous things like that. I was never very interested, but Kevin's a really great guy otherwise, so I'd go along with it just to make him happy. Nothing ever happened, of course, or at least not anything scarier than a cop almost catching us smoking a joint in a crypt we weren't meant to be in. But that never seemed to stop Kevin trying.

Anyway, that summer one of Kevin's odd jobs was working in a bookshop a few doors down from a storefront funeral home. George Wakely & Sons, it's called. And when he was emptying the bins one afternoon, he realised that the alleyway the bookshop backed up on also ran behind the funeral home. There was a door near its dead end that he'd barely even noticed, but he worked it out in his head that it had to be a back door into George Wakely & Sons. And one day, when he was scheduled to close the shop late in the evening and the funeral home had already closed for the day, he tried the door -- and he found that it was open. The lock was broken, actually, and it seemed like it had been for some time. They must just not have bothered fixing it because it was half-hidden in an alley, and in a sleepy part of town, and who wanted to break into a funeral home anyway?

Kevin did, that's who. And he wanted me to go with him. He called it an "adventure," and I laughed at him, but I said I'd go along anyway, because that was what I always did. It was Kevin, and it made him happy, so why not?

I did have one condition this time, though. I asked if I could invite along Leah Princewill, a good friend of mine from uni. I knew she was from Stratford and was home for the summer, and it wasn't so far to get there. I thought she might think it was a laugh. And to be quite honest, I had a massive crush on her, as well, and I was quite keen to see her without waiting for next term. Maybe some guilty part of me even thought, you know, a spooky funeral home at night, maybe she'd get a bit freaked out and cling on to my arm or something, and that would be very nice. Please don't get me wrong, though -- I've seen plenty of those shitheads who moan about being in the "friendzone," and only even talk to girls like people because they think they're machines you put nice into and eventually sex comes out, and I was absolutely not looking to be one of them. I really liked Leah, as a person and a friend, I wasn't just hanging round her hoping she'd eventually sleep with me. I guess I never said anything because I just didn't want to mess things up, you know? Sometimes I'd think I was getting signals back from her, or that maybe we were flirting a little bit, but I was never completely sure. And what if I tried to ask her out and it turned out I was wrong? I'd look like an ass _and_ I'd lose one of my best mates. I could just never work up the nerve to take the risk.

Anyway, I asked her if she'd like to come, and she said it sounded completely stupid and she'd love to. That Saturday she caught a bus, Kevin had the keys to the bookshop, and a little after midnight we snuck through it to the alley, and in the back door of George Wakely & Sons.

I don't know what exactly Kevin was expecting, but it really was not very interesting inside at all, even exploring with torches in the middle of the night. I mean, it was a place of business. Everything was tidy and quiet, and it just looked like a rather nice old home where some of the rooms had been used for some odd things, and it smelled like somebody's gran. Hardly the stuff of nightmares. Even the mortuary mostly just looked like a research lab or something to me, but I'm a poli sci major. Kevin started saying he wanted to look in the refrigerator where the bodies are kept, though, and I just felt like that was a bit inappropriate, so Leah and I left him to it and went looking round the public parts of the place. We were in the showroom pretending we were comparison-shopping for urns or something, when Leah noticed a light coming from a few rooms away. We went looking for it, and found it was coming from the viewing room. There was actually a casket set up in there, on a stand, and with a spotlight still on it. Of course there was nothing inside, though, and there weren't any chairs set up or anything. Just an empty casket stood, lit up, in a totally empty room.

That actually _was_ a bit creepy, I'll admit. Much to my disappointment, so far it had seemed like Leah was even less likely to get spooked by the place than I was, but I think that sight rattled her too. So of course we both right away got a bit silly about it, to pretend it wasn't making us uncomfortable. We teased each other back and forth, and then Leah... well, she dared me to get inside.

I _knew_ that was across a line, all right? I didn't want to, and not just because I'm a bit claustrophobic at the best of times. So I dared her right back, that I'd get in but only if she got in with me. I thought she'd say no and that'd be the end of it, without my having to look too cowardly. But Leah just laughed and gave me a look, sort of a flirty look, I guess? And she said all right. And, well, naturally that changed everything. I still didn't want to get in there, but if it was going to be us both pressed right up against each other, well, I'm only human. Of course now I had to go through with it.

So she held it steady while I opened up the bottom part of the casket and climbed in, and then she climbed in too. And right away, I don't mind telling you it felt like a terrible mistake. I doubt if you've ever been in one personally, but I can tell you that a casket is quite a tight space for just one person, and it's _ridiculous_ for two. Even if the other person is a girl you fancy. I started laughing to cover up how uneasy I felt, and I was just about to say, all right, we did it, let's get out now, because I really did not want to be in there any longer, even with Leah.

And then the lid slammed shut.

I know what you'll think. It was Kevin, come creeping in behind us and playing a stupid prank. It's what we thought, too. I actually freaked out a bit, it was so dark and so close in there and I felt like I couldn't breathe, but Leah just started knocking on the lid and calling for Kevin to let us out, it wasn't funny at all. That got me grounded somewhat, feeling like everything made more sense and I could breathe again. I started knocking too.

And then the casket was picked up. There's no doubt about it in my mind, it was obvious that was what happened. It moved and lifted around us. The wood creaked in the sides, and we were swayed gently back and forth. Carried along, and _moved_. I don't even have to say there's no way Kevin could have done that, even if I thought he would have, do I? It's just not possible. One person, with the size of that thing, and how much it must have weighed just by itself without two fully-grown adults inside -- he couldn't have. And Leah and I had just been in that empty room, just seen it empty, and we'd been all round the whole place. There was no one else there.

I couldn't control myself. I was pounding on the lid by now, screaming, shouting for somebody to let us out. The only thing saving my dignity at all is that Leah was doing the same thing, and she hadn't been scared of anything thus far. Both of us just howling and hitting the wood as much as we could pressed into each other, hitting each other as often as not. And all the while, we could feel the casket being carried along, to God knows where.

We never heard a car, or any kind of vehicle. Just what seemed like an eternity of that slow, swaying motion. Like some pallbearers we couldn't see were just walking along with us, endlessly. I couldn't reach my phone and I was panicking too much to have any sense of time, but I could swear to you, without a doubt, that it was well over an hour like that. If nothing else, we'd both screamed ourselves hoarse and worn ourselves absolutely ragged by the time we finally felt the thing set down again. But then the motion stopped, and we could feel it come to rest again somewhere solid, the creaking of the wood all at once going quiet.

And then we started to hear another sound. A soft thump and then a rattling scatter, over the wood at the top of the casket, right above us both. The first time it happened it startled us both into silence, hoarse and terrified and trembling with exhaustion, and then it came again. And again. And again. Getting deeper and more muffled every time, starting to sound further and further away.

It was dirt being shoveled in over the lid. Of course. What else do you do with a casket but bury it?

I don't know when I started screaming again. Or when Leah did. Or how long we both flailed and screamed there, pounding and kicking at the lid of the casket, just trying to get _something_ to move or break or even budge the slightest bit. Nothing did. The dirt just kept falling, thumping faintly in above us, sealing us in. Every second, a little more deeply trapped down in the dark. That also went on for a very long time.

Leah was the one who finally calmed down enough to start saying we had to stop shouting. She had to grab at me and shake me some to finally get through to me. There wouldn't be enough air, she said, if we wasted too much of it. Maybe if we tried to keep still, and keep calm, we could... last long enough to be rescued, or something. I could tell she didn't believe it, and I could hear in her voice how hard she was crying. But it was something to think, at least, and focus on. At the very least, leaving myself out of it, I definitely didn't want to have to think I'd killed the woman I loved by stealing too much of her air. So a little at a time, I actually managed to get hold of myself. And when Leah pressed into me, wrapping her arms round me as best she could like that, I did my best to hold on to her right back.

We both knew we were never going to make it out. We'd been buried inside a coffin, for God's sake. I just lay there holding her, and all I could think about was all the things I'd regret: not seeing my family again, everything I'd been planning to do after I graduated, and of course, never telling Leah how I felt about her. And finally I realised that, if nothing else, I could still do that last one, couldn't I?

So I told her. My voice was trembling a lot, but I said she didn't have to feel the same way or even say anything, but I just needed her to know how I'd been in love with her for ages, since our first year. That I'd just been too afraid to say anything, and how much I wished I had.

Leah got very quiet, and it was almost comforting for a moment to be afraid of something trivial. If anyone could make being buried alive unbearably awkward, it would have to be me. But then she just started laughing a little, though she still sounded teary. And she said she'd felt exactly the same way, and she'd just been hoping that I would say something first.

I couldn't believe it, but I actually laughed too. It was just so stupid and sad and funny all at once that there was nothing else I could do. And somehow... it wasn't as bad, suddenly. It felt almost like we could breathe a bit more, like there was a bit more room and air than there had been before.

And, one way or another, we wriggled ourselves around so we could start kissing. I mean, why not? We might as well, if we were going to die anyway. Even in that dark horrible casket, it was honestly wonderful. We kept at it for a long while, and then Leah grabbed my hand and put it up her shirt, so I started touching her and grabbing her bottom, and one thing just... led to another. I know it's mad, but at least it was some sort of comfort. One last nice thing before the end. Neither of us could get quite on top of the other, but we could get our hands down between us, and each get the other's jeans open and our hands inside. She just kept moaning my name, telling me she loved me, and all I could think was, well, even if there's nothing else, at least I had this. At least I'm with her.

It was a bit hard to get at everything between her legs properly, until she just sort of jammed her upper leg up against the lid of the casket over me. And though I was very preoccupied at the time, I did think for a second I heard something click. She had her hand around me as well, though, and I stayed very focused on what we were doing. Soon we were both moaning and running our hands over each other and rocking the whole casket around us, and I buried my face against Leah's neck and just kept my eyes shut.

We both got off like that, first me and then Leah squirming up against me. And then we just lay still together, and held each other. And I opened my eyes and pulled back, so I could look at her... and then I realised I _could_ look at her. There was a crack of light coming into the casket from above, and I could actually see.

When we both thrashed around to look, we saw the light was coming from the lid. It was a little bit open, like it had gotten jostled in the midst of everything we were doing. And instead of dirt falling in, there was light.

Of course we didn't waste a second more in shoving the lid open and scrambling ourselves out as fast as we could. And we both fell, very hard, onto a hard floor, enough to rather knock the breath out of me. We sat up, and looked around, and... we were back in the viewing room, like we'd never left. The casket was sitting open under its spotlight, not a speck of even dust on it.

We didn't even have to talk about it: we both just went racing for the Employees Only area again and the back door, desperate to get out of there as fast as possible. On the way, though, Kevin stepped out of the mortuary, looking very taken aback seeing the state of us. He asked if something had happened, and -- I'm not proud of it, but I started screaming at him, what had he been _doing_ , hadn't he heard whoever had taken the casket out? Kevin was very upset, as you might imagine, but more than that, he was just utterly bewildered. He said we'd only just left him in the mortuary. It hadn't been more than five minutes or so.

He could see how upset we were, though, and we hadn't exactly been quiet, if anybody was at home in the flat upstairs. We all left in a rush, and nothing else happened, really. We told Kevin the whole story, when we calmed down, but I don't think he ever really believed us. I haven't talked to him much since, to be honest. I'm sure he's still got his weird hobbies, and if I never see another casket again as long as I live, that'd be perfectly fine by me.

\------

Statement ends.

\------

The worst sound ever to hear while working in the Magnus Institute, by a wide margin, was a pleasant, pre-recorded female voice over the public address system saying calmly, "Breach of perimeter reported in Artefact Storage. Please proceed immediately to your nearest emergency exit."

Jon was only just halfway through a hurried trip to the toilet, with the tails of his shirt hastily tugged out to disguise the extremely annoying state that last statement had somehow left him in (ridiculous, really; what was the matter with him?). He was swearing under his breath even before the announcement had finished, but he knew better than to linger. Resigning himself to feeling very awkward for an extended period of time, he changed direction to head swiftly for the stairs.

Only for two people to come barreling out from the stairwell in his direction, when he'd almost reached it.

"Nope, wrong way!" Tim called as soon as he saw Jon, with what seemed like typically inappropriate good humour. Sasha was jogging a bit ahead of him, out of breath, and there was considerably more strain in her features..

"He's right, Jon, the stairs are having a -- bit of a problem. I think we'd better shelter in place--"

And given their pace, he barely had time to even begin stammering objections before they had both rushed up and harried him, more or less bodily, into a far-too-small storage cupboard along one side of the corridor.

With the door shut and the occasional alarming noise coming from off in the distance outside, Jon found himself pressed up tightly to one wall, amid boxes of labels and dusty file folders at his feet, with Sasha crushed up against his chest almost nose-to-nose with him, Tim pressed up behind her by his back to the other wall. The width of all of their shoulders scarcely cleared the space between the cupboard's back wall and the door, Tim's by far by the narrowest margin. The tight space was noisy with all of their laboured breathing for a moment, and then gradually they began to settle, some of the fear and alarm subsiding.

"Well, this is cozy," Tim said after a moment, because of course he did. Jon could only just see the weary amusement on his face over Sasha's head, in the dim light from the door's crack. "Let's hope they find whatever it is sooner rather than later, hmm?"

"Keep your voice down, if you don't mind," Jon hissed back at him, although it lacked some of the bite it might have had in other circumstances. He tried to shift his position as subtly as possible, to somehow inch his hips out of range of contact, and then froze when he could immediately feel that he was only making matters worse. Worse yet, it also seemed like Sasha went still as well -- although he couldn't be certain, as he turned his head at once to stare at the wall with furious intensity, rather than make eye contact.

"Jon," she said cautiously after a moment anyway, though, damn it all. He shut his eyes. "I don't want to be crass, or make accusations, or anything, but... is that--"

"I'm _terribly_ sorry," Jon managed through gritted teeth, and pressed his palm over his closed eyes for good measure. Perhaps if he couldn't see this situation, it would no longer be happening. "There was -- a statement I was recording -- I don't know why but it seems to have had some sort of _effect_ on me, and now -- I sincerely apologise, I certainly didn't mean to--"

"Oh my heavens," Tim was drawling even as Jon was sputtering himself off into nothing, horribly -- even as from the sound of it Sasha might have been muffling a burst of startled giggles into her palm. What a wonderful day this, in particular, would be to tender one's resignation. " _Dirty_ archivist! Are you hoarding all the salacious statements to yourself, then? No wonder you're so fanatical about recording them."

"Tim, stop," Sasha said, reprovingly, before Jon could even build a properly indignant head of steam to object. When he could dare to risk a look, she was in fact still struggling against a bit of a smile, although at least she also appeared sympathetic. "It's all right, Jon -- if that's the oddest thing that happens today, I think we'll all be able to count ourselves fortunate." Jon snorted, though he found himself very slightly eased in spite of literally everything. Sasha turned a small encouraging smile more directly on him -- one that might even have looked a bit breathless again, come to that. "And, well, I hope _I'm_ not crossing a line here, but, under the circumstances -- I don't suppose it's usually, er, your cup of tea, but if you wanted... a bit of help?"

Thunderous silence ruled the cupboard, for a moment.

"I'm sorry?" Jon said finally, his voice coming out much higher and thinner than ordinary. Sasha was already becoming flustered herself, though, speaking almost over top of him.

"I-I don't mean... I know, that was a bit much, but -- we don't know how long we'll be in here, and if you're going to be uncomfortable--"

"Jesus, Sasha," Tim said, but to Jon's alarm his tone was as much approving amusement as surprise, and his shoulders were shaking with laughter. "You're gonna make him explode."

"What, and you'd both -- just be all right with that?" Jon demanded, probably more accusingly than necessary. Sasha just smiled, though, with a sheepish little shrug.

"Well -- yes. If you would. We're all friends here. And it does sound better than just being stuck terrified and bored in a tiny cupboard."

"If you wouldn't be comfortable with that, though," Tim said over her shoulder -- somewhat more seriously, although the smile he turned on Jon still seemed to be making sweat prickle out of his skin--"I don't suppose you'd be all right with our just entertaining ourselves, instead? Well, and you, for that matter."

"Tim, really?" Sasha said craning her head up and back to look at him as best she could, although also with much more fond amusement than Jon could readily handle mentally. Tim affected a scoff.

"Excuse me, _you're_ the one making me picture you wanking Jon off in a cupboard while I watch."

Sasha laughed, but she also turned her head back to glance at Jon -- and she was definitely breathing more quickly, even feeling warmer where she pressed up against him. "Jon?"

It was only that prompting that made Jon realise he had rather frozen, and he could only seem to unstick himself by swallowing hard and blinking. Somehow, it was that thought that had arrested him, far more than the initial offer: his mind running away prankishly with the idea of him watching them, of them _wanting_ him to watch them--

"I..." His voice would hardly come, dusty and dry. He tried another swallow, unable to make much eye contact. "If... you'd like."

"Would you?" Sasha pressed. Her hands had come to be up on his chest at some point, and now gently smoothed the fabric just below the shoulders of his shirt. Jon shut his eyes again, and had to fight his own throat to work any air through at all.

"Yes."

It was barely a sound at all, but it was enough. The energy of the air around all of them itself seemed to shift: tautened, like fabric between pulling hands. Then a rustle of movement managed to make Jon squint his eyes open, and he found Tim craning in over Sasha so his head was near Jon's and his mouth on Sasha's neck, her eyes now warmly far-off and lips parted. Tim shifted and squirmed against the close walls after a moment, as well, and then his hand was pushing awkwardly up and around and finding its way between Sasha and Jon at the front, the sudden brush of its back against Jon's chest making him jolt. Sasha's hands slid up to his shoulders, though, to grip them and to give Tim's hand freer access, and she let out a sighing unsteady breath that tickled Jon's neck as Tim's fingers moved over the peak of her breast, pressed tightly between their bodies. And, of course,Tim's other hand sliding in around Sasha's hip made Jon hiss and twitch even more than before, when its knuckles brushed teasingly against the rigid rise of his cock in the process of tucking fingers between her thighs.

There was only so much he could see in these quarters, but nothing he could look away from: Sasha's closed eyes and the tremor in her lips, the sly shifting movements of Tim behind and around her, her grip staying on Jon's shoulders for leverage. Even when Tim lifted his head and looked straight into Jon's eyes over Sasha, his own eyes hot and dark and face flushed and fast breath coming through a smug little smile, it pinned Jon in place so badly he could only stare back. It was impossible to tear his eyes away, even as Tim's smile broadened at the sight of however his face must look.

Then Tim was looking down instead, his shoulders lifting to fumble around himself. Jon could see nothing at all of his hands but he could hear soft sounds of crinkling and tearing packaging, and then shifting rubber and skin, that rather spoke for themselves. So did Sasha's soft laugh, come to that, and the matter-of-fact way she dropped her hands for a moment to hitch up her skirt, reaching up under it to tug down her underthings from the sides. Trapped between Jon and Tim as she was, she had to do a fair bit of wriggling and tangling of all their legs to escape the little scrap of fabric, and it all had both of them breathing a bit harder by the end.

Her hands came back to rest back on Jon's shoulders, using them for balance, as she pushed up as tall as she could to match Tim's bent knees. Tim tugged her skirt up over her waist, and Sasha pressed her feet outward as far as she could to spread out her thighs a little, and canted her hips back with Tim's hands. Then they both moved in an uneven unison, and with both of them facing him Jon could watch the quiver of Sasha's lips, the flutter of Tim's half-closed eyes, amid the ragged pair of soft sounds they each made. Apart from the sly suggestion of their rolling movements together, it was really all he could see.

It was more than enough. Jon swallowed convulsively and leaned his head back hard on the wall behind him, the tickle of Sasha's breath falling across his throat. And somewhere that felt miles away, his hand crept to the fastenings of his own belt and flies, tugging them apart with quick uncertain little jerks.

He tried to keep himself as pressed back as he could, but Sasha still hissed a surprised little breath over his skin when the back of his hand brushed her: at the front of her mons, feeling shockingly bare skin and soft wiry hair. Jon twitched backward as best he could, immediate heat flushing his face in spite of anything and everything.

"Sorry," he said, barely a stammery breath, but Sasha's hot fast breathing only caught in a laugh.

"No, not at all," she whispered nearby, and then had to interrupt herself to catch again on a little _ah_ of sound as her body moved with Tim's. "Please do."

Jon exhaled hard and nodded. Still, he drew himself out and began to stroke as slowly and carefully as he could, given his trembling fingers and how long he'd spent aching with denial -- enough to make an inadvertent groan jerk out through his teeth at his first touch on his cock. He squeezed his eyes shut at once, cheeks hot again, not daring to see how either of them reacted. It turned out he didn't need to, though: he could hear perfectly well how Tim's breath made a little voiced stutter, and Sasha drew in a quick breath and then made a shuddery little sound in answer. None of it helped cool his head in the slightest.

He couldn't keep from looking for long, though. Even as his hand quickly started fighting to exceed the controlled pace he was trying to set, he was drinking in the expressions on both their faces, the frankly obscene way they were moving together and pushing up into him, the occasional flutter of Tim's or Sasha's eyes open to hotly meet his own. Almost at once Tim had slipped his hand back round Sasha's hip to slip between her thighs at the front again, making her little cries and shudders between breath come all the more often, and the back of his hand and of Jon's took to rubbing right up against each other in their mismatched rhythms. Tim's other hand moved restlessly over Sasha's hip as he rolled himself into her, over her skin and down her bare thigh, then forward to stroke instead over Jon's clothed thigh and hip and then back to her again, seemingly without discriminating at all. Jon's hips jolted as his breath hissed in through his teeth at the touch, and dots of sweat prickled and rolled down from his temple and the side of his neck.

All put together it had Jon on the edge of coming with a speed that was frankly embarrassing, not to mention unprecedented in his life to date. Before he knew it he was gasping, gulping his breaths deep, the stroking of his hand so fast and wild and unsteady it seemed to tangle with Tim and Sasha's motion, becoming just a part of the whole messy business of everything that was happening. Sasha's hands squeezed on his shoulders and her mouth pressed wet and open and panting against his neck, Tim kneaded clumsily at the front of his thigh and gasped " _Fuck_ , yeah, go on," and he burst into orgasm hard and suddenly enough to startle him, the ragged sound tearing out of his throat as much surprise as pleasure. He shuddered, his other hand cupped round his cock-head as a weak shield against soiling his clothes and Sasha's, and gasped breaths that each ended in a creak of sound as hot wetness spilled over his hand.

And when he was aware of anything again, Sasha was writhing and crying out up against his chest, her thighs trembling so hard he could feel it in his own, her fogged glasses completely askew on her face as she also plainly came apart. And Tim's breath was already ragged as well, his face flushed and strained with pleasure over Sasha's shoulder even as his hand between her legs worked to a fever pitch, and it wasn't much longer after she had collapsed slumped against Jon that he also rocked in a few last hard thrusts and then went rigid, with a long, aching groan.

Then for a long moment, they all just leaned together, breathing in fast mismatched rhythms, no one moving or making a sound. At least the close quarters kept them all pressed together tight enough to stay standing.

They were still like that when, muffled through the cupboard door, the soft chime of the all-clear began to sound from outside. And that was when Tim, still out-of-breath and wheezing, started laughing. Sasha caught it quickly from him; and though Jon was extremely reluctant to follow... eventually, he couldn't help himself.


	3. Mile High Club

Statement of Liam Daniels, regarding an encounter during a commercial airline flight:

This happened a few months ago, on my first and last business trip for my previous employer. I had recently been promoted to a junior executive position, one that I'm quite young for as I understand it, and I had been asked to take an international flight to Dubai to make a presentation to some very high-profile potential clients. Of course I accepted immediately; I could have reasonably assumed that my new level of responsibility would involve increased travel, and even if not my superiors had made that quite clear in establishing my new contract.

I was not in my best frame of mind when it came time to board the aircraft, however. My sister -- the only member of my family I really still speak to -- has joked often enough about the irony of my going to work in an aerospace engineering concern, given my terrible lifelong fear of flying. But really all I do is sales and management, and I'm damned good at both, if I do say so. The company itself could have been in any industry at all, as far as I'm concerned. And as I've often told her, it isn't that I'm afraid of _flying_ , it's that I'm afraid of _crashing_. The idea of all that yawning space beneath the aircraft, the only thing beyond its belly for kilometers on kilometers above the ground, it's... never been something I like to think about. And far less so now, of course.

So I'm sure you'll understand that I found it to be a quite welcome distraction when the person who appeared to claim the seat adjoining mine was an extremely attractive man. He was in very good spirits compared to mine, as well, humming something to himself as he settled his carry-on baggage and arranged his space. We were in business class, a rather pleasant and slightly intimidating reminder of the level of trust and capital being invested in me by the company, and there was room to be at least somewhat comfortable. We greeted each other pleasantly enough, and I certainly enjoyed the aesthetics of his presence, but of course I didn't wish to impose myself on him. After we'd both settled in, I began to work on my laptop and he to read what looked like a very well-loved old book, and that was that for the time being.

London to Dubai is about a seven-hour flight, all told, and having spent so much of my life studiously avoiding flying, I found myself unprepared for the sheer boredom and confinement of the experience, even in relative luxury. As every activity began to pall, there seemed to be less and less to focus on that wasn't my anxiety, and all the empty air outside. I found myself glancing toward the window, again and again, little though I wanted to. There was nothing but blue and clouds out there, and the awful emptiness of it seemed to draw my eyes like some horrible, gory accident on the hard shoulder as you pass. You don't want to look, but you can't seem to stop yourself. I really wished we could have the shade drawn, but my seatmate was the one beside it, and I didn't want to irritate him by asking.

Eventually, though, when my gaze made one of those nervous skitters over to the window, he glanced up to meet it. Quite awkward, of course, except that before I could look away he closed his book and gave me a warm smile. _Very_ warm, in fact. I realised, with a mix of relief, embarrassment, and mounting interest, that he must have taken my glances for glances at _him_ , and furthermore he seemed to find that idea more than welcome. In which case I wasn't at all sorry that he had interpreted it that way. He really was very good-looking, and it had been some time since I'd had time to try to pursue a relationship, with the long hours I'd been putting in angling for my promotion.

With no other preamble, my seatmate set aside his book, and reached over to deliberately rest his palm high on my thigh. And he made the suggestion, in a low voice, that if I was interested, I ought to make my way to the near side of the disabled lav, and he would see me in a moment.

All double-aisled aircraft, I've learned, are required to have a disabled lav, and this is most commonly actually two lavs side-by-side, with an unlockable partition between. That way, when the partition is open, a wheelchair-using passenger can roll in from one side and transition to the toilet on the other, you see, and in theory have the necessary room -- although I'd say that's probably questionably true at best. But that also means that, if you can move the partition aside, there's also room for, well, a few other activities. I don't think it's a coincidence that in the industry, this arrangement is commonly referred to as a "party lav."

So it seemed safe to assume that what he was suggesting was, at the least, most definitely something to distract me from my discomfort. I nodded, and gave him a weak little smile of my own, and stood up as best I still could.

I found the lav unoccupied, blessedly, and shut myself in. I was still quite nervous as I waited, although it was nice to have it be for different reasons now than before. I was dressed casually for the flight, as I'd been told I was only to be met by a driver in Dubai and should make myself comfortable, but I was wearing a nice shirt and slacks all the same, and occupied myself with getting them off and folded in the cleanest spot I could find.

Before too long, to my relief, there were muffled sounds from beyond the collapsible wall of the lav, and I heard my seatmate call to me softly to undo the locks on my side. I did with shaky fingers, and we pushed the partition aside together to reveal him stood on the other side. When we were face-to-face, he winked at me, which was just absurd enough to make me laugh a bit and put me more at my ease. He was wearing a very handsome cream-colored suit and tie himself, I had noticed, but he looked pleased to see me down to pants and undershirt, and that was also gratifying. We did a bit of necking and groping each stood in our respective tiny sides of the lav, and then he nudged me into sitting down on the lid of the commode on my side, and then lying awkwardly back over it with my shoulders braced up against the sink. Then he could strip me the rest of the way bottomless, before producing a condom and lube from his coat and getting ready to fuck me.

I definitely can't say the sex wasn't good. Honestly, that sort of makes it worse. Because it _was_ very, very good. I tend to prefer bottoming, and I'm not exactly a virgin, but he was better than any top I've ever been with before: sliding in with just the right slow, firm speed to catch every sensitive nerve in me on his way in, and then pushing my thighs up tight to my chest so he could bottom out all the way inside. Prostate stimulation can be a bit much for me, honestly, I don't always love to be fucked really deep so much as hard, but he worked it just right. Just enough of a flare to make me gasp, and then right away drawing back again slow, so he could drive in again. A series of quick flickers amid stuffing me with his cock, so it was almost a tease. He kept a slow, rolling rhythm with his hips that had me shaking before long.

I was so busy moaning and writhing on his cock that I wasn't really aware of my surroundings for some time. Which was for the best, as far as I was concerned. But as I grabbed up at his arms, under my thighs, for leverage, he murmured suddenly, "Open your eyes." And that was not only hot, but sort of romantic, which took me a bit by surprise. Enough at least that I did exactly as he asked.

That was when I saw that the lav no longer had a floor.

The toilet and sink I was braced between were still bolted up to the wall, and holding up my weight. But beneath them, where previously there had been some imitation of a tiled floor in between all the cramped-close facilities, there was nothing at all. Not the belly or innards of the airplane, not the waste tank or any other mechanisms that ought to have been beneath us. Just... nothing. Only that depth of empty blue and drifting clouds that lay beneath the plane, beneath everyone on board. More, even: I stared at that hellish pit of sky for what felt like forever, long enough to burn it into my mind, and I couldn't even see the ground that should have been beyond the clouds. They seemed to stretch all the way into forever. What I had taken for only the roar of the engines and the rush of circulating recycled air was actually the howling, sucking wind of void, all around us, all underneath us. My hair and my seatmate's, the edges of his clothing and his tie, all whipped wildly in the wind of that incredible emptiness that yawned just below where he was fucking me. And his feet, I saw, were planted on nothing but air.

My chest seized so tightly I could barely even breathe, and I clawed to hang onto him, to hang onto _anything_. I was fully in the grip of panic, all thought immediately sucked out of my head by that nothingness underneath us, and my heart was going so fast it felt like all one long beat.

And he -- _laughed_. He didn't seem frightened or even surprised at all, just... pleased, like he'd done something clever. And just kept fucking into me, in those slow rolls that felt so amazing and made every muscle inside me twitch at the end, even as he was bent over me while stood on nothing. And... God, it was _still_ good. Even in the most extreme grip of my terror, I was still so hard, so desperate. I didn't even dare move, for fear that I would fall off that toilet lid and just _keep_ falling, past his feet and past everything, and forever. But even as I held as absolutely still as I could, he kept pounding into me, and I can't even explain it, but it was somehow still the best fuck of my life. Even in spite of how terrified I was. Maybe even somehow _because_ of it? I don't know, I honestly don't. I never have.

At any rate, before long, my head was nothing but hot buzzing fear and lack of oxygen, but I was also shuddering all over as I got closer to coming. I tried to cling to him at the same time, in spite of how difficult it was to focus on anything at all. I knew I was going to come so hard, I wouldn't be able to help it, and any movement I made ran the risk of sending me plummeting into the eternity below --

But finally I couldn't hold it back any longer. I came hard enough to white out my vision, enough that for at least one blissful second I wasn't even aware anymore of the situation I was in. It was so much, so intense in its grip on me, that it actually clenched my throat _so_ hard that I was able to unlock it. And for the first time, for as long as I'd wanted to, I could actually scream.

I don't know if he reacted to that at all, really, but as I came down enough to start being able to pant for air, he was fucking me harder than ever, driving relentlessly into me for a last few seconds. And then he came too, buried deep inside me, with just a little groan that I could barely hear over the roaring of the wind.

He had no sooner caught his breath, though, than he looked at me -- and this huge, terrible grin came across his face, as he met my eyes. There was nothing sane or human about that smile; it turned his attractive features at once into something absolutely horrifying, like a skull just painted with skin. Like an empty nothing.

Then he grabbed me by my hips, with a huge and sickening, abnormal strength. And he dragged me all at once bodily off the toilet, to fall.

And at the exact same time, someone knocked very sharply at the lavatory door.

He jerked, in the process of dragging me off -- just a bit, like he'd been startled. But even as my eyes were huge and watering in my head, my jaw locked around another scream I couldn't quite force out, and my whole body was bracing for the endless tumbling that was about to come -- no more than a fraction of a second later, I hit something hard, enough to jar my breath out of me and make me bite my tongue. And I found myself sprawled, panting and panicking and near-naked and soaked with sweat, on nothing but the lav's tiled floor.

I stared up at him, and he stared down. I don't know what in the hell I might have expected from him right then, but at the most, I think he just looked a bit disappointed.

The rapping at the door came again, though, and this time there was a raised voice to go with it. It was one of the flight attendants, sounding extremely annoyed, and she made it clear in no uncertain terms that my scream must have been _quite_ audible from outside the lav and that the flight crew had been able to put two and two together about what we were up to. Or what they thought we were, anyway.

I couldn't speak at all, and my seatmate just sighed, and turned away to dispose of the condom and tuck himself away again in his trousers. He washed his hands at the tiny sink on his side, and then before I could react at all, he simply went out the door. The opposite door, I was dimly aware, from the one the flight attendant had been pounding on.

For my part, I just sat until I could somehow begin to catch my breath, and then finally I scrambled back to my feet and managed to throw my clothing back on in some kind of order, with the knocking and scolding comments about "our passengers with disabilities need to use the facilities as well, sir" still coming all the while. Then I shakily slammed the partition shut again, and burst out of the lav and away as fast as I could, nearly bowling over the angry flight attendant in the process. Whatever she might have said in parting, I wasn't listening.

Of course I dreaded going back to my seat, and risking seeing my seatmate again, but where else was I meant to go? When I did muster up the courage, though, I was tremendously relieved to find he wasn't there. Even the book he had been reading had gone as well. For the entire rest of the flight, he never came back. Shortly before we finally, blessedly landed, I had myself almost together enough to actually ask one of the flight attendants where the man in the seat beside mine had gone, but she only frowned at me and said that seat hadn't been purchased on this flight. I didn't even have it in me to argue.

I met the driver in Dubai, did a stellar job on the presentation if I do say so, and then absolutely ignored my scheduled flight home. I rented a car, instead, and drove the entire seventy-odd hours it took to return to London overland, through some territory that I found looked much more dangerous on television than it did in person. It took me just over a month, meeting some wonderful and hospitable people along the way, and it was actually a truly fascinating, eye-opening experience for me, as I'd never really been abroad before. When I returned to the city I found I had been long since unceremoniously fired from my position, of course, but I didn't care. The person I was when I wanted that promotion to junior executive so desperately seems to have... well. Vanished into thin air.

\------

Statement ends.

\------

The knock on his office door came while Jon still sat slumped and catching his breath, making him hiss and jump badly. He barely managed to flail and scramble his zip back up, cursing under his breath, and toss away the tissues from his hurried scrub at his hand, before the door clicked open. (Christ, had he not _locked_ it? He'd thought he had, but clearly he must not have done. Idiotic.)

"Oh, I do hope I'm not interrupting," Elias said in through the doorway, with all good cheer, before Jon had even mustered himself to turn round in his chair. "I didn't hear you, so I thought you must've finished. Are you nearly ready?"

"Just... about, yes," Jon managed, and tried to sound less out of breath than he was. He tried to compose himself as much as possible as he turned and stood up, and at least seemed to succeed; Elias's professional smile changed by not so much as a raised eyebrow.

"Excellent. Ah, just one moment, you've got yourself a bit crooked--"

And he was stepping much closer before Jon could do anything except feel alarmed, and taking hold of the dreadful tie Jon had felt obligated to put on with his most presentable suit, tugging at it with brisk expert hands. He was not an especially tall man, but Jon was at best about eye level with his chin, and he stood very close to better see his work. Jon stared into the tastefully muted brocade of Elias's suit's vest until his eyes began to water, and his slightly sticky hands balled tight by instinct at his sides. The whiff of cologne that drifted to him was low and rich and dark.

"I've had RSVPs from most of our top donors for tonight, and they're all very anxious to meet my newest acquisition," Elias said in an absent sort of tone as he set Jon's tie in order, and glanced up at his eyes with another faint bland smile. "You won't have met Colin Fairchild before, will you?"

Jon's breath rattled a bit in his throat at the sound of the name -- but he thought he'd managed to catch most of it in a swallow, from his swift look at Elias's face. "No, I'm afraid I haven't," he said, and at least sounded neutral if also a bit hoarse. Elias chuckled.

"Oh, I think you'll enjoy him particularly. He's quite a bit younger than our usual crowd, just a bit younger than you, I'd say -- He manages some of the endowments for his grandfather, who's getting a bit on in years. A lovely young man. You should be sure to find a chance to speak with him."

He said nothing else, though, and Jon faltered a bit. That was it? ...Could it be just coincidence? Surely not, but... Jon swallowed again, as unobtrusively as he could, and fixed his eyes down as Elias released his tie. It never did help to probe, when it came to anything to do with funding.

It came as no relief whatsoever, though, when he was distracted by Elias suddenly frowning down at him again, and producing a handkerchief from his pocket -- and proceeding to also rub at the fabric near the bottom of Jon's suit jacket. As though he had noticed a spot of something there. Jon felt blood first drain from his face and then seem to fill it entirely too hotly, and he focused on just standing as still as possible and pretending none of this was happening.

"There you are," Elias said after what felt like an absolute eternity, tucking the handkerchief away again, with what Jon imagined was probably not unlike paternal indulgence. He clasped Jon bracingly once round his shoulders as though to conclude the matter, and then turned as though to lead the way out. "Shall we, then? There'll be hors d'oeuvres and a bit of chatter before the main meal, of course."

"Ah. Yes. Right. If I could just -- " Jon made an absolutely meaningless gesture, floundering, and just found his face hotter when Elias finally did raise the eyebrow he'd feared. "I'll just, ah. Pardon me one moment. And then. Yes."

"Of course," Elias said, smiling again, and stood aside as Jon practically rushed past him to escape out the door and to the lavatory. "We wouldn't want you to be uncomfortable."


	4. Bound

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See notes at the end for content warnings for this chapter.

Statement of Deborah Howland, regarding services rendered by a professional dominatrix:

Before I begin, I want to make it plain that the element of sex work in this account is purely incidental. I realise how it appears, for a person like myself to be apparently _reporting_ someone like Maura to an authority -- even an authority as dubious as this one -- and of course I recognise that there is still significant stigma associated with sex workers, to which I have no wish to contribute. On the contrary, I've engaged the domination services of a number of other women in the past, and I've found all of them to be diligent, responsible, discreet professionals, entirely committed to safety and good sense. Even Maura herself seemed to be reasonably reliable, at first. Before the man in the stairwell. And the spiders. And

\------

"Oh, absolutely not," Jon said, and shoved the written statement away from him across his desk.

In the corner of his eye, he saw Tim look up from where he'd sat himself unceremoniously on the floor, in the process of sorting ill-gotten photos of police evidence into the folders of statements that had been residing in Jon's office. "Something wrong, boss?" he asked, amusement plain in his voice. Jon sat resolutely back in his chair.

"I'll record a statement about sexual activity. I'll record a statement about spiders. But _absolutely not both at once._ "

Tim had started laughing now, apparently unable to help himself any longer. "What, you're gonna halt the glorious process of academic inquiry on account of a few sexy spiders? For shame." Jon thinned his lips, and after a moment Tim pushed up to his feet, with an easy grace that as always should not have been possible with so many very long and muscled limbs. "All right, give it here. I'll do this one."

That gave Jon pause, and then he blinked up at Tim standing over him, taken aback. "Are you certain?" he asked, with a more sober tone than either of them had really had before now. "I mean, normally--"

"Oh, yeah, I'm not looking to make a regular thing of it," Tim said, with all appearance of good cheer, and held out his hand. "'Sall right, though. I can read this one if it'll stop you fainting dead away in your chair."

"I wasn't going to--" Jon began peevishly, but then Tim had already snatched up the statement from the other side of his desk, and given it a theatrical brisk shake. He glanced at the tape recorder, but Jon had never actually turned it off.

"Right. Let's see. Deborah Howland, professional dominatrix, hurrah for sex workers generally, blah blah... Ah, here we are."

\------

And the whispering.

I should start at the beginning. I've been a barrister for over ten years now, as a member of Gray's Inn. It is, as you may imagine, a profoundly stressful career, particularly to undertake as a woman, with the futures of others often dependent on my good work even as my peers and superiors seem to take that work far less seriously than that of my male counterparts. I am required daily to exert a tremendous amount of control over my person, my circumstances, my schedule, and as much as I am able, other members of the court. As such, I've found that I find it quite relieving to pursue recreational activities that center around ceding control to another, in a safe environment. I have little time for personal relationships, I'm afraid, given the demands of my work, but in general I've found it sufficient to seek out experienced professionals for the satisfaction of my more intimate needs.

I just recently moved back to London after practising for some time in Birmingham, mainly to be closer to my mother, whose health has begun to decline. Naturally I've foregone a number of my established contacts in the process, including the professional dominant I was seeing regularly prior to the move. This was hardly an urgent situation, of course, and I might have been content to go without a replacement for some time, except that I happened across an unusual adverisement of services. I was browsing an online postings board looking for a housekeeper for my new flat, when my attention was caught by a post reading:

_I'LL TAKE OVER_

_Tired of the pressure? Release your worries and inhibitions and let someone else decide what you need. I can show you the things you never knew you craved. Ask for Maura._

Followed by a telephone number and email address. I could provide these, but I'm afraid I'm quite certain that both were temporary, and will since have been changed.

I found this to be an intriguing approach, to say the least, in large part because of how little it said. Although private arrangements are legal, a number of postings of this nature do still tend to be rather coy, so it wasn't entirely out of the ordinary. Still, the providers I tended to engage previously had all been quite explicit in the specifics of their requirements up front: _professional dominant, no public play or bodily injury, other requests and limits to be negotiated on initial interview, must present recent results of testing,_ and so forth. All very much above-board. Under ordinary circumstances, I would have considered an advertisement like this one to be quite dodgy, actually, and given it a miss... but something about the way it was all phrased simply got my blood up more than I was able to deny. It spoke so directly to what I wanted: the surrendering of control, the freedom of being under the care of another. It gave me such a shiver that in spite of the oddity, I found myself eventually calling after all.

I met Maura first in person at her flat, which was to all appearances an entirely nondescript second-floor walk-up in Islington. It was small and tidy, but extremely crowded with furnishings and decorations, with scarcely an aisle to walk between the sofa and table and television, and most every available surface covered in some sort of knitting or crochet. I was quite certain at one point in our initial interview I heard a cat miaowing from a back bedroom it had been shut up in. Maura herself I found to be likewise nothing like I might have expected, based on stereotype or experience a diminutive, thin, and rather mousy woman with long lank hair and large glasses, who dressed primarily in cardigan jumpers and voluminous broomstick skirts. I have not generally known my contacts to do anything so absurd as to dress all in leather or insist upon being called Mistress, but they do tend to project a certain persona that aids in the experience -- and, I would imagine, keeps it easier to compartmentalise from their personal lives. For example, Maura's predecessor had been partial to wearing tailored suits, and met me in a minimalist office space with only the most functional of furnishings. By contrast, Maura just seemed... rather disarming, I suppose. Though I wasn't so impolite as to ask, she also seemed to be quite young, likely only in her mid-twenties, which I must admit I found somewhat disappointing. I don't mean to disparage young people, in sex work or otherwise, but as a professional woman in my late forties, I found the prospect of attempts to dominate me by some inexperienced student trying to pay her way through a gap year to be a disheartening one.

I resolved to give her a chance if only for politeness's sake, however, and we conducted our initial interview. If it can even be called that. I settled myself on Maura's sofa, and she brought me a cup of tea unasked and then simply seated herself in the chair opposite, smiling benignly at me through her glasses as though with no intention of asking or discussing anything further. I found myself struggling uncomfortably to fill the silence on my own, by volunteering the sorts of details a professional would normally have asked me at this point: my particular preferences, safeword protocols, dislikes and hard limits, and the clean bill of health based on recent testing that I could present on request. Maura spoke then only to say that wouldn't be necessary, and then she went back to staring and smiling at me again, in silence. I must admit I was quite thrown and disorientated by the entire experience, and I fumbled my way through excusing myself and leaving after what was probably a rudely short amount of time.

Obviously I was less than impressed by that initial encounter, and it didn't take me long afterward to decide that I would not be pursuing a further relationship with Maura. I didn't call or email her to follow up -- and therefore it came as quite a surprise when two days later I received a calendar appointment, with no message whatsoever, requesting a time in the evening a little over a week later and giving the location as her address. I was taken aback and no little affonted by the presumption, but... I think that there was something strangely exciting about it, as well. The demand. The lack of any opportunity to negotiate. Perhaps that's only hindsight colouring my memory; but whatever the reason, it was scheduled on an evening that I had entirely free, for once, and in spite of any misgivings I had, in the end I couldn't think of a good reason not to give it a go.

Maura was no less quiet and peculiar on my return, but she did seem to have a bit more sense of purpose to her. She guided me from the door deeper into her flat than I had been before, and I found it to be quite a bit larger than I had anticipated, with a twisting rear hallway that seemed to be full of other rooms, almost labyrinthine when you were a stranger to it. She guided me to one of the doors and opened it, to another close room with chintz wallpaper, but with no other furnishings than a complex rig of heavy-duty straps and rigging and restraints dangling from the ceiling. She told me to disrobe and stand in front of it, and in spite of her still soft and vague manner my excitement and anticipation at last began to outweigh my misgivings.

As I had expected, when I was ready she helped boost me up with surprising strength, and strapped my arms and legs into the rigging so that I hung suspended, my arms held above my shoulders and my legs hitched up and widely open. She strapped extra cuffs to my wrists and ankles as well, so that I was entirely pinned in place, and whispered softly to me all the while she moved around me to make me secure. To be honest, it was so quiet that I couldn't make out what she was saying, although I very quickly didn't care in the least, given how deeply and overwhelmingly aroused I found myself at once. It was actually rather unusual for me; I've never found bondage quite so appealing in its own right before, but something about the way I was arranged, and her manner, and all the strangeness of it, had a tremendous effect on me. I was soaking and desperate by the time she stopped simply admiring her work and put her fingers to my lips, and though I tried to writhe where I was suspended, it was somehow completely impossible to move. I could only let her touch me, and fast sink into the almost trancelike state of mind that overtakes me when thoroughly dominated. There were even times when I thought that her hands felt strange on me -- too thin, and perhaps even bristly -- but my mental state had been such that later I couldn't give any credence to such ideas.

I wrote her a check with trembling hands and wandered home in a daze afterward, scarcely remembering any conclusion to what had happened, and I felt so wonderful for the following days that I could hardly think of anything but when I could next schedule a time with Maura. I tried to reach out to her, but there was no response. But just like before, after about two weeks, another appointment request simply appeared, demanding the time that best suited her. This time, I did have a professional dinner scheduled on the evening she had requested, but my need was so great that I cancelled immediately, and went to see her instead.

Our appointments were very similar to that first one for a time. She would take me to the room with the swing, have me strip and tie me into it, and whisper to me inaudibly as she got me off. Sometimes she would just use her fingers, sometimes a toy, and sometimes as time went on she would spank me or flog me where I hung helpless from her ceiling. And always, my arousal would build beyond all sense and ability of mine to control, and I would come harder in her grip than I ever had before, with anyone, and I wouldn't be able to properly think of anything else until the next time I saw her. My work began to suffer, over time, and my personal and professional relationships, simply because I could no longer summon the interest to maintain them. My mind was always only on Maura, and what she would do to me when next we met.

After I had been seeing her for a month or two, though, things began to... change. The first truly alarming event was an appointment that began like all the rest: I was strapped naked into the swing, and Maura hovered around me, whispering to me. Then she left the room abruptly, bringing me out of my head a bit with mild concern. She returned shortly, however, appearing back in the doorway to the room with something large cradled in both her arms. As she moved closer, I could see that it was a terrarium of sorts, but instead of holding some appropriate pet, the whole of it seemed to teem with constant, undulating motion. And as she came right up beside me again, I could see what was causing it: the terrarium was absolutely full, near to brimming, with large, thin, brown spiders, boiling over one another and the stones at the bottom in a roiling and skittering mass. 

I have always found spiders very discomforting and loathsome in the way that some people do, and I was certainly not pleased that she had such a collection or that she was bringing it to me in that position. But her whispering began again as she drew close, her lips barely moving around sounds I could only hear the edges of, and to my surprise I began to sink quickly back into the mental space of submission. And I could not break free of it, even as she unstrapped my nearer wrist, and unfastened and took away the lid of the terrarium.

Though she didn't speak as she held it out, somehow I knew immediately what she wanted from me. I absolutely did not want to do it, but I knew. And in spite of anything I wanted, any objections I might have wanted to raise, any safeword I might have wanted to call out... instead, I found myself reaching out, and into the terrarium, to take a large handful of spiders into an extremely gentle grip. I carried them slowly back toward me, crawling all over my hand and up my wrist and forearm, my eyes locked on them and mind screaming endlessly without my mouth ever being able to open for it. And I released them from my hand, in an erupting scuttle of thousands of little legs, over my own face, my neck, and down my naked chest and body.

They covered me: carpeting my face in a tickling mass, as I desperately tried to shut my eyes and mouth against them, but also prying at my ears, my nose, suffocating me; endless tiny legs shivered down what felt like every inch of my body, raising gooseflesh and utter horror behind them. From what I was able to find out afterward, I believe that they were all of a type of wolf spider, which are not particularly dangerous to humans: their bite produces only a bit of pain and itching. One at a time, anyway. With that volume of them all over me, me already reaching to the terrarium all in spite of my will to add _more_ , if they had all just bitten and bitten and bitten... well, I don't know. But they did not. They only scampered over me, head to toe, in my hair and across my body and in the spaces between my fingers, making all of my skin want to shudder and contract and my mouth want to risk opening only to scream.

But I didn't. I came, harder than I have in my entire life, without even being touched by anything but those tiny legs. And then, overcome, I blacked out.

When I returned to myself, I was wrapped in one of those many hand-knitted blankets on Maura's tiny sofa in her living room, another mug of steaming tea in front of me and my clothing folded beside me. Maura was sitting beside me, stroking my hair, murmuring to me -- not whispering now. She insisted I eat and drink, and stay wrapped up until I was warm, and finally I dressed and left her flat not really sure of what of it had actually happened. But eager to get away as fast as I could, from the uneasy sense that there might be something moving in that blanket just in the folds that I couldn't see, and the phantom sensation of innumerable little tickling legs.

Of course I had far more severe misgivings, after that night. But I couldn't help myself: the next time she set an appointment, I went back again. In time the horror of the memory faded, and all I could remember was how intense my orgasm had been, how world-shattering the pleasure I had felt, and it drew me back.

The next time, though, was different. Maura greeted me smiling at the door, but I don't remember her taking me back to the same room after, or having me strip and get into the swing. In fact, I really don't remember anything immediately after I arrived at her flat. The first thing I recall after that is coming back to myself, thick with confusion, as though emerging from my submissive state of trance after a particularly intense session. I was moving, I became aware, raising my hands again and again and bringing them down into a curiously satisfying solidity -- like the feeling of tenderising a side of meat. There was something warm and tacky cooling on my bare skin, all down my front and over my thighs.

I was naked, as normal, but I soon became aware that I was not in Maura's flat at all. I was in a narrow stairwell, paneled with chipped dark wood. It took me a moment to identify it as the stairs up to Maura's walk-up, only because I was seeing it at an angle at which I never had before: from down on my knees, at the very bottom, where ordinarily bin-bags began to line up as the day for collection approached. The walls and stairs rose high all around me, trapping me in.

And I was knelt with my legs straddling a man, who was lying on his back on the stairwell floor. He was staring up at me, huge-eyed and rigid, and when I looked down at him with my eyes just as wide I could see that there was a thick rivulet of blood seeping from his mouth. And it was only then that I realised that what I was doing with my hands was bringing down an enormous, serrated hunting knife, one I had never seen before in my life, down over and over again into his chest. Stabbing it into him. His blood was pulsing and gurgling out over his clothes, spattering my hands and chest, sticky all over the front of me. I had no idea who he was, how long I had been doing this, or _why_ on earth I would be doing such a thing, but even once I had realised, _I couldn't stop_. The man was still trying to paw up weakly at my arms as though he could stop me, but neither of us could, and he was dying, the life fading out of his eyes even as I helplessly watched myself stab him again and again.

And all the while, I could hear whispering. Maura whispering to me, the way she always did as she made me captive, unintelligible but intimate so close to my ear. She wasn't there, she was nowhere in the stairwell or anywhere near, but I could still hear it just as plainly and surely as if she were right beside me, strapping my wrists.

The man went still, gradually, and his eyes glazed over. And only then I could stop; and immediately, straddling his lifeless body and still clamping the knife in both my unresponding hands, I had an orgasm of such violent, unbearable force that I completely passed out.

It was the same after: me returning to myself back in Maura's flat, shaking uncontrollably, as she cared for me and washed my hair in her little shower. I thought there was red in the water at its bottom, but I had apparently been in there for so long I could no longer tell if there had been blood on me or not. I asked Maura what had happened, when I could finally muster up the courage to -- but she only smiled, and told me that I had been a very good girl.

There was no body and no blood in the stairwell when I left, and though I've kept an anxious eye on the newspapers, I haven't seen anything about a murder matching what I remember. I've no idea what that means, though. I'm not sure I know what anything means anymore.

I haven't been back to see Maura since then. Of course, I don't normally set the appointments, so that isn't entirely by my choice, and I am terribly afraid of what will happen when I next see that notification of the time she's chosen. That's why I've come to make a statement to you, in fact, not really knowing where else to turn. I could have gone to the police, I suppose, but given my profession, I can see the irony in the problem: I haven't any evidence of a crime.

You see, it's not that I'm afraid of her scheduling me for another appointment, exactly. It's that I'm afraid, when she does, that I won't be able to keep myself from going.

\------

Statement ends.

\------

"Oh, yeah, I do remember this one," Tim said after a moment's pause at the end of the statement, still skimming over the paper. "We never did find anything about her. Sasha didn't have much to go on about the original post, and Martin was fending off escorts from Islington for weeks, they thought he was trying to get himself a dom but he was just shy about it. At least that bit was hilarious. It's weird, though, there was one thing--"

But he stopped there, seeming to cut himself off. And, horribly, in spite of his extremely fixed gaze straight in front of him, Jon became aware it was because Tim was now looking at _him_.

"...Jon? You all right there?"

Jon was not.

There were two factors in particular impeding his all-rightness. The first was that Jon was achingly, urgently erect -- and even worse, _visibly_ so. The khaki slacks he'd worn that day were on the loose-cut side of fashion, meaning that there was plenty of room for Jon's prick to expand beneath them and rise into a rather telltale bulge beneath the otherwise unremarkable fabric. There was no possible explanation for the way he looked at that moment beyond overwhelming arousal.

The second was that there seemed no way for Jon to disguise his condition. Of course, he could have pulled some object into his lap or rolled closer to his desk or done _anything_ to make sure that there was some visual barrier between the bulge in his trousers and Tim's wide-eyed stare. Except he couldn't have, not really, because Jon did not seem particularly able to move at the moment, certainly not in a way that would have accomplished anything. Breathing heavily, he swallowed hard, trying to think of something, _anything_ appropriate to say in such a situation.

It consoled Jon at least a bit that this was Tim, though. If anyone here could understand, it would be Tim. Tim, who sometimes showed up to work in outfits that did not come close to covering the marks on his neck that Jon hoped were not love bites, even though he knew that hope was in vain. Tim, who leveraged his romantic liaisons for work contacts, and likely vice versa. Tim, who waxed poetic about his crushes on various celebrities and openly wished for them to pluck him up from obscurity and make him their pool boy. Tim, of all people, could be cool.

When the expression on Tim's face turned from surprise into a sly smirk, though, Jon knew he was done for.

"Well now, boss." Tim set the statement papers back on Jon's desk and looked only at Jon -- and _really_ looked, with a full and appreciative stare that left no doubts as to what he might or might not see. "This _is_ interesting. See, I'm left wondering just what it is about that statement that did it for you. Because I _know_ it's not the spiders."

Jon managed to pull quite the face at that. No, it was certainly not the spiders. Frankly, if he could physically scrub his brain of the spider imagery it had accumulated in the past half hour, he would, and good riddance to anything else that got knocked loose with it.

"And," Tim continued, turning more fully Jon's direction, "I'm _fairly_ certain it's not the grisly murder."

Shaking his head, Jon swallowed hard.

Tim folded his arms across his chest, leaning far too comfortably on Jon's desk. Of course he was taller than Jon -- frankly, some days it seemed _everyone_ was taller than Jon, pets and children included -- but this height difference was different, intentional. Tim looked down at him as though from some unimaginable height, leaving Jon pinned like a collected insect to his chair. "Then ... the part about being tied up?"

The moan-like gasp that slipped Jon's lips at that moment made the answer clear. It was absurd, absolutely ridiculous; in fact, he'd always regarded sexual bondage as a bit silly at its core, and certainly a great deal of work to accomplish something he wasn't particularly interested in anyway. All of which just made it that more irritating that Tim's saying so had made him hard enough to ache.

"Hold on," said Tim, as though Jon had given any indication he might be intending to go anywhere, or even capable of it. He didn't go far, though -- just outside Jon's door to the larger area where the archival assistants kept their cubicles. Sat alone in his office, Jon could only listen as Tim rummaged through things, opening and closing drawers before at last making a quiet noise of triumph. The suspense of his discovery lasted only as long as it took for Tim to return to the door of Jon's office, where he stood for a moment, silhouetted by the light from the room behind him, holding a length of rope.

Tim was no artist when it came to rope bondage -- or if he was, he wasn't bothering now. Instead, he wound the rope several times around Jon's chest and arms, fixing him in place and his forearms to the arms of the chair. If he had needed to, Jon supposed, he could have gotten out. The problem was, he didn't want to. He let the ropes around his chest constrain his entire self because he wanted them to do exactly that. He wanted Tim to hold him down.

Finished, Tim leaned back against Jon's desk, surveying his work with smug satisfaction. "Could blindfold you and gag you too, I suppose," Tim said with a shrug that might have been casual, except that Jon could practically see the tension of control stringing Tim's muscles taut. "But I want to hear you. And I want you to see me, _boss_."

Jon indeed was watching as Tim sank to his knees before him. A sharp jerk of the chair's hydraulic lever brought Jon's hips right to the level of Tim's lips, which was a height Jon had never before in his life had cause to measure. He bit his lower lip as Tim unfastened the front of Jon's khakis. Tim looked right back, making full and unashamed eye contact with Jon as he reached between the folds of fabric and wrapped his cool fingers around Jon's shaft.

The sensation was so sharp that Jon cried out. Tim let go immediately, making Jon's heart sink. What had he done wrong? Of course he shouldn't want something like this to happen, but now it had started, he certainly didn't want Tim to _stop_!

Tim, however, just smirked as he made a tutting noise. "Oh no," Tim said, reaching slowly for Jon's prick for a second time. "You don't come until I tell you to."

The flush that rose in Jon's cheeks seemed almost impossible, given how much of his blood was currently being directed elsewhere. Tim ran his fingertips up along the underside of Jon's shaft, a delicate touch that made Jon's cock jerk. "Of course, you're the big boss now," Tim teased. He bent in to place a kiss just at the slit, coming away with his lips slick with precome in a way that was vulgar, disgusting, and so erotic that Jon's brain threatened to short-circuit. "Gotten comfortable with telling all of us go there, research this, do that. Telling us where to get off. Tables have turned, though, boss. Now I'm the one that's telling _you_ where to get off."

If he'd remotely had the wherewithal, Jon might have rolled his eyes at a line like that, but he did not. There was no room in him for anything but staring at Tim as though hypnotised, his lips parted around his rapid breath, as Tim met his eyes and replaced his own lips with his tongue. And then Jon could only shudder and make a feeble, pitiful sound without meaning to, as Tim laved that single spot of warm wet touch around his tip and then up his shaft. The line it left cooled under Tim's breath and the air almost at once, and there was nothing he could do at all but sit bound and and feel every last bit.

"Yeah, this is what it's about," Tim said, an edge of a purr to it, drawing his mouth back again -- which made another choked little noise of protest catch in Jon's throat in spite of him. "Someone else taking charge, leaving you helpless. So you don't have to choose and you can't do anything about it." His hand gripping Jon's cock worked it in lazy, idle strokes as he spoke, far too light to do anything but make Jon's hands clench up on the arms of the chair. He didn't dare squirm, not even _move_ , save for the fast heaving of his chest. "That's all right, I can do that. All you have to do is take it."

And before Jon could even try to school all his scattered mind and body into some sort of response to that, Tim had leaned back in, and begun to take Jon's length with torturous slowness between his lips.

He could almost wish Tim _had_ gagged him, if only to spare him the humiliation of the noise he made. The slick soft heat enveloping him was unbearable, more than his senses knew what to do with. He could actually feel Tim chuckle in the slight buzz of his lips, and Jon clenched his bared teeth on another loud whimpering cry that wanted out of him, letting his head thump back against the back of the chair. It felt like an hour before Tim's mouth was wrapped around him up to where his lips met the loose circle of his fist at Jon's base, even though logically it could hardly have been any time at all.

This had never been an act he much cared for, honestly. The general idea of his cock in someone's mouth he tended to find disconcerting at best, not to mention that he could be such an exercise in frustration to keep hard and get off that he'd be concerned about doing a partner's jaw permanent injury. But now, like this, with his bizarre secondhand arousal so urgent and desperate, something that felt foreign to his body and all the more raw for it... Every movement of Tim's mouth and hand around him felt like it was keeping him right on the edge of coming already. He sweated and trembled and gasped embarrassing whimpery sounds, and held back from the precipice only by clinging to the order Tim had given him, where it echoed in his mind.

Eventually, though, with the relentless rhythm of Tim's mouth on him, even that couldn't be enough. "P-please," he stuttered out thin and strained when he couldn't hold it behind his teeth any longer, his hands flexing and clawing uselessly in his bonds. "Please, please, I need--"

Tim's eyes flashed up to find his, and Jon only just had time to see the absolutely evil glint in them. And then Tim had pulled back sharply, all the way off him and leaving his slick cock throbbing untouched in the air, hand clenched tight at his base just to make certain he had no chance of release.

Jon _sobbed_ , his breath wrenching out of him like something that had stabbed him twisting free. Tim leaned in intently, over the tight grip of his hand, staring up at him.

"Yeah?" he breathed. "Say it. Beg."

"Please let me come," Jon somehow choked up out of him, his voice so thin and high and strained it didn't sound like his. " _Please._ "

For one terrible, eternal second, Tim didn't move. Then his mouth twisted, just slightly.

"Come then," he said, and dove in before Jon could even register it to suck him back in _hard_. His mouth took Jon's cock deep and rough and demanding all at once, tongue rolling and lashing all around it like a mad thing.

Nothing Jon could do -- not his pressed lips, not his clenched jaw, not his clamped teeth -- could hold back his shout. His _scream_ , really. His hips jolted once entirely past his ability to control, and then he was coming in Tim's mouth so hard the world whited out around him, and every inch of him lit with it, burning in place.

Perhaps one of the most annoying things about the man was that Tim could look good doing _anything_ , and as Jon was finding out, that included swallowing through the end of a spectacular blowjob. He kept his eyes trained on Jon the whole time, so that whenever Jon looked down at him, he was met with Tim's piercing gaze, fixing him to the chair far more surely than did the ropes. Helpless, Jon gasped and tried to catch his breath as Tim withdrew his lips from Jon's softening cock, inch by agonising inch. Jon even whimpered a little as the head of his cock at last slipped free from Tim's mouth, cleaned expertly of the evidence of any unprofessionalism.

Tim stood then, and it was to great surprise that Jon realised how much the bulge in Tim's jeans was just about at eye level. Tim pawed at it with no subtlety, making sure Jon could see through the fabric just what it was Tim was working with. Jon, who tended to disdain not only receiving but also giving oral sex, suddenly caught himself midway through licking his lips. Of all the unexpected reactions that evening, that was perhaps the most startling.

However, Tim instead climbed into the chair with Jon, facing him. He leaned forward, straddling Jon's hips as he reached around to the back of the chair to where he'd knotted the ropes. His face pressed to Tim's chest, Jon could smell nothing but Tim: clean sweat, laundry detergent, some unidentifiable body spray that Jon couldn't _believe_ he thought smelled good. He closed his eyes and took in the scent as Tim freed him. 

After a few seconds, Jon could feel what little pressure the ropes had exerted let go. Instead, it was Tim's body that now held him in place, anchoring him to the chair. Tim leaned back so they could see one another, then stroked his fingers down the curve of Jon's cheek. "Good boss," Tim said with a smirk, in the way someone might praise a dog. Jon considered biting him. Instead, he leaned into the touch.

Chuckling, Tim at last climbed off of Jon's lap and started for the door. He was clearly still hard himself, but he mostly looked smug about it. Damn the man for his ability to look causal even with an erection. "We should do this again sometime, yeah?" Tim asked with a smirk.

No, they absolutely should not, for _so_ many reasons -- none of which explained why Jon was nodding along to the outrageous and frankly unprofessional suggestion, or which his cock was already beginning to stir with thoughts of a second round.

Tim's smirk widened into a full and wicked handsome grin. "Maybe I'll put an appointment in your calendar too," Tim said, glancing back over his shoulder as he opened the door to Jon's office and walked back out into the rest of the Institute. "Mark you down as unavailable. Let the others know you'll be tied up."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Statement CWs:  
> -generally bad BDSM practice on account of horror reasons  
> -supernatural mind control  
> -spiders being put on a person in a sexual situation  
> -unwilling murder of an unnamed bit character with a knife
> 
> Post-statement CWs:  
> -very light bondage and domination with nonetheless no real explicit consent or negotiation
> 
> As will be the case in every chapter, you can skip to the end of the statement if you prefer and have the rest still make sense!


	5. Donated Collection

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See notes at the end for content warnings for this chapter.

Statement of Zachary McNiall, regarding the unexpected results of a discussion with a romantic partner:

I've never been the world's most outgoing or confident guy, so dating was hard enough for me even before it eventually had to involve the conversation about "oh by the way, I've got genital herpes." It's not always a dealbreaker, but I can't say I've ever really had a _positive_ reaction, either. I always have the conversation, though, long before it seems like anything's going to happen. I'm not an _asshole_. I don't want to go into how I got it in the first place -- it really isn't important, it was just a matter of stupid kids being ignorant and reckless, and I'm fine with looking like an idiot but I don't want to throw the girl I was seeing under the bus -- but I've been managing this for a while now, and I've got a good sense of when it's starting to be time to talk about it. But that doesn't ever make it easier.

I'd been seeing this girl Kate from work for a couple of weeks, and I really liked her. We got on really well, she was beautiful and smart and funny, and on every date we'd been on I thought there had definitely been a spark. It seemed like we were heading towards things getting a bit more serious, and I was really nervous about having the talk with her, because I just liked her so much. If that was it for her... well, that was her right, but it was going to crush me.

But I screwed up my courage, and asked her out for a dinner date one Saturday night. Finally, when I was walking her home afterward, I told her. I hit all the bullets on the list: it was managed, I saw my doctor regularly and I was taking antivirals, and of course I didn't want to be presumptuous about where things were going but if we did decide to have sex at any point we could do that, it would just require some care to make sure she was safe. The whole thing. Better to have it all clear and out in the open, I've always thought.

Kate listened, and nodded, and even asked a couple of questions. When I'd said it all and I was holding my breath at the end, she just smiled at me, brilliantly, and kissed me. She said it was fine, and thanked me for telling her, and said she was glad I'd felt comfortable enough to talk about it with her.

And that was it. She took my hand, and we just kept walking down the pleasantly cool back streets to her flat. It was... honestly amazing. I was so happy, I felt like I could just burst out of my skin. I couldn't remember any girl I'd ever dated being so completely calm about it and okay with it. It was like every good feeling I'd ever had about Kate was cemented, and I felt like I could really be in love with her.

The even bigger shock, though, was when we got to the door of her building, and she asked if I wanted to come up. She was... really not shy about what she meant by that, either. I was actually so surprised I just sort of babbled for a bit, and asked if she was sure. I mean, right away after all that? But she just laughed, and told me of course. My head was in such a state that I probably should have tried to take a rain check myself, honestly, but... it was really wonderful, you know? That she wanted to, even right after I'd told her. And I hadn't had an outbreak in a long time, and I just couldn't think of a good reason why not, and a lot of good reasons to go ahead. So I said yes. We went up to her flat, and we started kissing, and she kept kissing me while she led me back to her bedroom and started taking off my clothes.

I managed to ask if she had a condom before we were out of any more than our shirts: I really had not been expecting this, and I hadn't brought any with me. Kate got one from the toilet, and she already had it unwrapped by the time she came in, giving me the sweetest little smile. She tugged me out of my trousers and pants to put it on me, while I sat on the side of her bed. I made myself useful taking off her bra, and then toying with her nipples, and she bit her lip and moaned. She really was gorgeous all the time, and especially like that. Her skirt was still on, but she didn't seem to want to wait; she just knelt down, with me still sat where I was, and started stroking me. And then put her mouth on my cock, and started to ease her head down and take me in.

I know men complain sometimes about condoms, but it's really the only option for me, and if it's protecting the other person I've never found it that much of a hardship. There are times when it feels like it's not all it could be, depending on what you're doing, but at the end of the day it still feels like someone sucking you off, you know? My mother always told me to be grateful for what you get in life! Although definitely not in this context.

What I'm trying to say is, Kate's mouth felt absolutely incredible, and that was all I was paying attention to right then and there. She didn't try for deep-throating or anything -- I've always found that mostly a bit alarming, to be honest -- but she stroked me at the root with her hand and worked me to the tip with her mouth and her lips and tongue. Just sucking really tight so it all felt hot and slick and close, and tonguing around the tip in these little flicks that felt like sparks. She blew me away just as much with her mouth as she had by being so sweet about my confession, and all I could think was how good it was and how crazy I was about her.

Of course I tried to be really gentle and careful with her, just keeping my hands on the bed and holding as still as I could. On the other hand, it'd really been a pretty long time, and I was moaning before long, and before much longer I was on the edge of coming. At least with the condom you don't have to worry about whether someone wants it in their mouth or not, I suppose. But I told her I was getting close, and she just kept up that tight patient rhythm -- even went a little faster and harder. And at that point, just opening my eyes and seeing her like that, with her lips wrapped around my dick and her hair mussed and her breasts bouncing a little when she got really into it... that was more than enough to be the end of me.

When she'd eased off me I sort of tumbled back on the bed, gasping for breath, and Kate was nice enough to slide the condom back off and toss it in the bin. She came back after a moment and cuddled in beside me, and I rolled over to kiss her. I noticed she kept her mouth closed this time, which was a little bit odd -- but maybe she thought I wouldn't want to taste it? Good enough for me if it's good enough for her, I would've said, but whatever. Even when I asked her if she wanted me to do the same for her, and started explaining I didn't get mouth sores and it was safe, she just nodded, smiling at me, and didn't say anything. Fast enough to kind of cut me off, too, so it seemed like she was pretty worked up herself, which was a nice feeling.

I slipped off her skirt and her pants, and got in between her thighs, and went down on her. I love eating a woman out, to be quite honest, so the fact that's still something I get to do has always been a bright spot for me. I tasted her for a while and started tonguing at her clit very gently, getting deep into how she tasted and smelled, loving how her thighs shivered to either side of my head. She seemed really into it, which made it a bit weird how she was still so quiet -- not making any noise more than heavy breathing, or the occasional little hum. I was a bit worried I was doing something wrong at first, but she was so wet and her clit was so hard it seemed like a good start, and before long at all she started shaking and bucking under me and definitely came, so quickly it took me a bit by surprise. So, that was good news -- I thought maybe she was just quiet. She certainly let me know how she was feeling by digging her fingers in my hair, when I started gradually ramping up to number two.

After three, though, she pushed me away in a nice sort of way, and all the muscles in her legs did feel shaky and exhausted when I was pressing back against them. She coaxed me back up to just hold her, so we did that for a while. It was really nice, just lying there the two of us, together, her curled up on my shoulder and me stroking her hair. It felt like something I could absolutely get used to. We'd already said neither of us needed to be anywhere in the morning, so it seemed all right that I was starting to fall asleep, and pretty quickly I got all the way there.

When I woke up it was just barely gone five in the morning, and starting to get light outside. I might've just dozed off again as soon as I woke, except I registered after a moment that Kate wasn't in the bed. And then that I could hear some soft clanking and thumping sounds from the toilet, as though she were moving around and doing things in there. That woke me up a bit more, as I was starting to worry whether she was okay, if she was ill or something. I moved over to the side of the bed she'd been on, nearest the toilet, meaning to get up and go check on her.

The door was slightly open, though, and I could see inside the room from where I was -- and something about the movements going on inside stopped me. I could see Kate, crouched down still naked right in front of the cabinets under her sink, just beside the door but with her back to me. It looked like she was rooting in the cabinet, digging for something. Eventually, she got deep inside to the very back, and pulled out a cardboard box, lifting it forward and then free and setting it on the floor beside her. It clinked when she put it down, and when she opened the flaps, I could just barely see that there were what looked like dozens of small, stacked, glass jars inside. Kate reached in, and took one out. As far as I could tell, it was empty.

She unscrewed the lid, and brought the open jar up to her mouth, hunching over it. And then she made this -- _noise_. Very quietly, but it was a really horrible noise, if I'm honest: a sort of deep grinding retching sound all the way in her chest, like she was about to cough up phlegm and be sick both at once. The pretty curve of her back convulsed and contorted with it, all the way from her hips up to her neck. And when she finally stopped making that sound, she _spat_ something out of her mouth and into the jar. It made a thick soft splatting sound on the glass like liquid, or maybe even like mud. But from what I could see of the jar in her hand, what she'd coughed up in there looked sort of insubstantial and swirling -- like a gas, or a plasma, or something, light enough to move around with even the tiniest movements of her hand. There was a lot of it, too, an alarming amount for anyone to have spat out of her mouth. The jar was almost full.

Kate didn't seem bothered about it, though. She just screwed the lid of the jar on, put it back in the cardboard box with the others, and closed it up again. Then she put the whole box back under the sink, almost having to crawl bodily into the cabinet to do it. She got up, and washed her hands, and cupped a palmful of water to rinse her mouth out, and that seemed to be it.

I don't suppose I need to say I had no idea what to think. I couldn't imagine what could possibly explain what I had just witnessed, but there didn't seem to be anything dangerous or unnatural about any of it. It seemed like a routine that she'd had in place for some time, something she just did by rote. I didn't understand it, but... well, I shouldn't have seen it, and it was Kate's business, wasn't it? It did nag at the back of my mind to worry that she was ill in some way, I suppose for obvious reasons given my history, but I didn't know anything for certain. And she hadn't brought it up with me. If she didn't want to make it my business, I wasn't going to invade her privacy any more than I accidentally had.

So as she was cleaning up, I started pushing myself back towards my spot on the bed, to lie down and pretend I'd been asleep. Before I could, though, something caught my eye. It was the bin over on Kate's side of the bed, under the bedside table, where she'd thrown out the condom the night before. When my eye happened over it, I saw the condom sitting on top of the other rubbish -- and it didn't look right to me. Something looked really wrong, in fact.

I know it's revolting, and I wasn't keen on the idea, but the idea that something was wrong with the condom was far too alarming under the circumstances for me to ignore, so I did it: I bent over, reached into the bin, and pulled the condom out gingerishly with my fingertips. And I could immediately see, with my stomach churning inside of me and my mouth going dry, that I'd been right. There was a hole in the tip of the condom. A big one. Somehow, at some point, it had broken catastrophically without my noticing, and the point of failure had stretched out so much it was hard to imagine it _hadn't_ been while it was on my cock. I stared at it, and my heart hammered miserably, and I couldn't seem to think or do anything at all.

Then I heard Kate asking me what on earth I was doing. I looked up, numb in my horror, to see her stood in the doorway to the bathroom, staring at me. It was really difficult to get my thoughts together, but finally I managed to hold the condom out and tell her what was wrong. I was babbling, full-on panicking and probably not making a lot of sense, but I did manage to get the idea across eventually.

And Kate just... smiled, and looked so kind and understanding and patient I could have cried, even though something about it honestly didn't even seem quite right at that point. She said was that all, and I'd got myself so worked up about such a little thing, she was sure it was fine. I tried to argue, but she just kept telling me it had probably broken while she was taking it off, I hadn't even noticed, had I? When I insisted, she promised she'd get tested as soon as possible, but she just seemed absolutely sure nothing would come of it: so much so that, actually, I started to calm down as well. Maybe she was right, I started to be able to think, and clear my head from all my shock and panic. Maybe it had just been at the end. Maybe everything was fine.

In the end I calmed down enough that I could toss the condom away again and wash up, and we went back to bed until it was really daylight again. I kissed Kate goodbye in the morning and she said we ought to do this again sometime, and I went home still feeling lighter than air in spite of myself, in spite of the worry still at the back of my mind.

It was enough, though, that I made an appointment with my G.P., just to make absolutely sure of what the risk level might be so I could let Kate know. I went in for some tests on my virus shedding, about which the less said the better... and then a few days later, his office called me, and instead of telling me the results, they asked me to come back in for more tests. I did, of course... and then when they called me back, they asked me to come in and do a full STD screening. Which struck me as a bit bizarre at that point, but what did I know? I'd told my doctor about the situation, so maybe he just wanted to make sure I hadn't picked up anything ese somehow that I might have passed on to Kate.

But when my doctor finally called me himself after that last test, he sounded exactly as baffled as I felt. He said he had no explanation for what he was seeing, but they had such a wealth of my bodily fluids by now and had done so many different kinds of tests on it that there couldn't be any mistake. Not only was I not shedding _any_ virus -- which in itself should not have been possible -- my STD tests had come back negative. All of them. Meaning: I demonstrably _no longer had herpes_.

Which is literally impossible, of course. The one thing everyone knows about herpes is that it's incurable, and lifelong. And yet somehow, miraculously, the disease I'd accepted having to live my whole life with had just vanished from my body, seemingly overnight.

My doctor was absolutely beside himself about it, calling me a medical phenomenon, and he wanted to do all kinds of additional tests and possibly write up a journal article on it. I politely said no, thank you, and hung up the phone. I think I'm going to need a new physician, honestly, he won't stop ringing and I'm just not interested. As a matter of fact, there are only two questions that I can find it in me to care about right now.

The first one is: _What was in those other jars under Kate's sink?_

And the second one is: Should I keep seeing her, or not? I don't mind telling you, I'm feeling more than a little conflicted.

\------

Statement ends.

\------

The sound of a long, fraught pause on the tape, followed by a sigh.

"Congratulations to this statement on managing to make the idea of sex with another person even _less_ appealing than it was previously. The... problem I'm having currently is regrettable, but I think I'll just see to it in the lavatory.

"And then I'm going to clean every last container of an expired condiment out of the kitchenette.

"End recording."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Statement CWs:  
> -condom failure (implied to be sabotage)  
> -STD transmission scare
> 
> Post-statement CWs:  
> -none


	6. Letting People In

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See notes at the end for content warnings for this chapter.

Statement of Zahia Nagi, regarding her experimenting with a new sexual act with her partner, Rose Michel:

I just hope my doing this is helpful to you in some way. It's embarrassing to tell a bunch of strangers about something this intimate, even if I'm only writing it down and I don't have to actually look anyone in the eye while I say it. I don't think you can do anything about it, and I wouldn't be asking you to even if you could, but what happened to me definitely seems like something of significance, and I feel like it should be on record somehow. I grew up in a family of doctors and scientists, and I work in biochemical engineering now myself, and I was raised to think very highly of research and empirical study. So I respect what you all are trying to do, even if you don't get a lot of credit for it, and I just want to add my story to your body of knowledge, I suppose.

My girlfriend Rose and I had been together about two years when I finally got up the courage to ask her about fisting me. It wasn't something I'd ever done before, with anyone, but I'd always been fascinated by it. It's not even that I'm that wild about size when it comes to penetration -- it's just something about a _hand_ , in particular, that makes it exciting. I've always liked being fucked with fingers, knowing that this part of someone else that she uses to do and touch all kinds of other things day-to-day is _inside_ me like that. So fisting is sort of like the next level up from that, you know?

But I guess what's even more important -- and the reason why I'd never done it before -- is the amount of trust it takes, in the other person. It's sort of a big deal to do it, and it takes so much preparation, and patience, and care, and having it done to you is a really vulnerable place to be in. You just have to trust the other person to take all the care with your body that they need to. That idea is really affecting to me, but all the women I'd dated before... Well, I liked them, we got on well, and we had a nice time together, but I never quite felt like I was that close to them, in that way. Even when I'd thought about bringing it up before, I'd always chickened out, just because I couldn't imagine giving up that much control and trusting my partner to that degree. I'd always ended up just setting the idea aside.

With Rose, though, it was different. We'd been seeing each other for longer than any of my previous relationships had lasted, and we'd actually recently moved in together, which was a first for me. I know, flying in the face of stereotype, right? We really clicked, deeply, and we'd hit this point where it seemed like we could spend all our time together without noticing, and understand each other perfectly without saying a word. I'd met all her family, I knew everything about what she liked and didn't like and what she thought about things, and I knew she was the kindest, most patient person I'd ever met. We had the connection that I felt like we needed, and I would trust her through anything. So I decided that it was finally time, and I wanted to try.

Rose agreed, to my relief, and she even seemed excited about the idea. Maybe just because she could see I was so excited by it, but I didn't think that was a bad thing either, if so. We talked about it, what we would need and what we'd need to do, and bought a few necessities. Even waiting for the weekend to give it a go had me deeply distracted as I tried to do other things, my stomach full of butterflies and my heart beating fast whenever I thought about it.

Finally we both had the time to make a nice long evening of it, and Rose still asked me if I was sure right from the start. If anything, though, that just made me more confident, and I kissed her and said so. We got undressed, and set things up, my stomach twisting with anticipation: laying down towels, sorting out the rubber gloves and a huge container of lube. I lay down and Rose stretched out on top of me, and we just kissed and groped each other for a really long time, getting me relaxed and wet. I was gasping by the time she started to touch me, building me up even further, just playing with my clit and then starting with one finger, then two.

I'd already come once by the time she paused to start preparing, just from all her long and luxurious stroking, shuddering and arching underneath the warm press of her body. I was sloppily wet and loose and thoroughly relaxed, and finally Rose sat up a bit, and asked if I was ready. I nodded, all out of breath -- and trying not to tense up and get nervous again in anticipation, and undo all her good work -- and she put on the glove, and covered it up in an absolute deluge of lube. Then she propped herself back over me, kissing me again, and began slipping her fingers back inside me, slowly. One, two, three, four, then the thumb tucked into the whole bundle. I just kept trying to breathe deeply, to let my body adjust to that much, and she was so patient and so gentle, never moving until I was ready..

After a bit I thought I was relaxed enough, and I told her to try it, and she started to press her whole hand in. The hardest part is clearing the knuckles, I'd always read, and sure enough, that was where it started to feel not just tight but impossible. Rose's hands weren't that big, but the one inside me felt truly enormous, and there just didn't seem to be enough space _in_ me to take it. Rose was being patient, I was breathing, but it was just so, so tight.

And then Rose... did something, with her hand. Not pushing or pulling back out, but something different -- I can't even really describe it, the nerves inside me couldn't seem to sort it out in all my sweaty, nervous, aroused confusion. It was almost like she fanned out her fingertips a little, at the tip, like a flower blooming, and she caressed them, maybe, along my inner walls. And then pushed on them. Not hard, not painfully, or anything like that, just a gentle sense of pressure.

But I swear to you, I felt everything around her hand, everything inside of me, _move_. Not like the muscles twitched, not that I relaxed a bit more and they stopped tightening around her. The entire sheath of muscle around her hand _shifted_ decidedly outward -- not much, but enough to make just that tiny bit more room to allow her knuckles through. The _bones_ that those muscles were nestled inside moved, too, helping create the space. It wasn't my imagination, and I'm not exaggerating: I _felt_ them. Just a tiny jostle and then settling back into place inside me, like when your leg's going to sleep and you shift your sitting position a bit. It didn't hurt at all, it wasn't even uncomfortable; it didn't really feel like much of anything, to be honest, except for just like things were moving. It was like the whole frame of my anatomy was an elastic waistband Rose had stretched out just a little, just gently, to let herself in.

Before I could really react, though, she _was_ in. And oh, God, was she in. I was very thoroughly distracted immediately from whatever that had been, because Rose's whole hand had slid up inside me, and we were doing it. She just held her hand still for a moment, letting me adjust, and then started to just sort of flex and pulse it gently, easing into very slowly and carefully pumping into me, with a bit of a twist to it that made light burst behind my eyes. Then she was working my clit with her other hand, and rocking that hand deep inside me, and I had no time or thought left for anything except how it _felt_ , how intense and overwhelming it was.

I came harder than I ever had before, awash in all the heat and love and absolute abandon Rose had pulled me into -- that I had trusted her to pull me into. And I still did trust her, and I felt sure I always would. So as I lay panting afterward, and she held me and kissed me and then saw to cleaning me up and fussing over me and making sure I drank water and a bit to eat, I just decided that whatever that had been, whatever she had done, it didn't matter. I wouldn't make an issue of it, and I wouldn't worry about it. I know that seems mad, considering that what she had done was completely impossible, but at the time, it was just what made sense to me. It was Rose. She wouldn't hurt me, and she hadn't hurt me. She'd just made it better, if anything. We were fine.

Even still, given enough time, I might have been able to convince myself that it hadn't really happened: that it had all been just my imagination, or at least that it hadn't been what I thought. I never had the chance, though. The next time Rose had her hand inside me -- just her fingers, this time, lazily fucking me with them late at night while she kissed and stroked me -- the same thing happened again. Differently this time, of course, but there was no mistaking it. She was pumping her fingers into me from the wrist, and then she was moving them just a little, scissoring them apart, stroking along me inside. And when she did, _I_ began to move with them: parts of me that shouldn't have been able to move, in ways that shouldn't have been possible. My pelvis gently shifting up and down from the inside, the meat and muscles inside it pushing outwards and rolling against each other and rolling against where her fingers were, from the other side of the same wall. Writing about it, _thinking_ about it, it seems like it should have been grotesque and hurt horribly, but it wasn't, and it didn't. It all just happened painlessly, and honestly it felt _amazing_. It was like she was using my own body to stroke itself, on the inside, and it was an indescribable sensation, beyond anything I can imagine anyone's felt before. I made these wild desperate noises, like nothing I've ever sounded like, I couldn't help myself, and I came so fast and so hard I think it shocked both of us a bit. And then we were just holding each other, and quiet, with Rose stroking my hair.

"Do you like it when I do that?" she asked me then, very softly. She could've meant fingering me, or the way she'd been playing with my nipple, but we both knew she didn't. It was the first time either of us had acknowledged it, and really, that I'd been entirely sure that she was doing it on purpose.

I couldn't really think what I should say, what would be the right thing to say, so I just told her the truth. I said yes, I did, I loved it. I said I loved having her inside me, and I trusted her. And she pulled up on her elbows to look at me, and she just looked... so, so happy. There were tears in her eyes, I think, before she kissed me, and then we just kissed and kissed, and that was the end of it. She didn't say any more about what it was, or how she was doing it, and I didn't ask. I trusted her, and that was hers to decide.

After that, every time we had sex, Rose would do something like that -- and it seemed like she got bolder each time. She'd make me a bit bigger to be more comfortable taking some toy with the strap-on, or she'd bring my nipples closer together so she could suck them both in her mouth at once, or she'd fold me in a way that shouldn't have worked so our mouths could reach each other while I was up on my knees. Once she turned my leg at a completely wrong angle to the rest of my body so she could make enough space between my thighs for what she wanted to do, and I didn't even notice until she was setting it back after. None of it hurt at all, and all of it just seemed to make everything better, easier, more intense and _more_. I loved what she could do to me, like I always had. She always took care of me.

It was a few days ago that we finally took it to the next level. We talked a lot beforehand, worked things out between us and decided what would make us comfortable and make sense, and how we'd need to prepare. Then that night, as Rose lay between my thighs with a towel down again, she started by spreading my labia gently with her fingers, like she was going to eat me out. But then she just kept stroking them, further and further apart, and they kept spreading and spreading, completely painlessly. To the size of her fist. Then her arm. Then even further. After a while she had to start moving my legs outward, and spreading my pelvis open. She spread all of me open, beyond all possibility, to where I was more open than solid. To where I didn't know where I ended and began anymore. It felt incredible, and I was dripping wet on the towel from that huge void at the middle of me.

Then finally, Rose put her arm into it. It slid inside me with no resistance at all, really without even touching me with more than a brush. She kept reaching, deeper, until I could feel the soft pressure of her hand up inside my torso, and then she started moving her shoulder inside too. Then her head, and other arm. And on and on, endlessly, until she was done.

Her work rang the other day, wondering why she'd been gone so long, and I didn't really know what to tell them. It's hard to explain to anyone else, you know? Some things are just between you and the person you love.

She feels very good in there, though. You can't imagine. Sometimes, if I put my hand just so over my lower belly, I can feel her moving.

\------

Statement ends.

\------

He'd stayed too late at work again, because of course he had, because the Life of Martin Blackwood these days consisted of one, his job, and two, all the things he wanted to avoid having to deal with or even think about. So in that balance, the job was winning.

Judging from the crack beneath the door, the light was off in Jon's office. Well, at least it seemed _someone_ around here had had the good sense to leave at a reasonable hour. Martin looked at the stack of files beneath his arm and hesitated for a moment -- Jon had been _so_ jumpy and on edge lately, Martin didn't know how he'd react to realizing Martin had been in his office without him. But Jon _had_ asked for the files once they were in order, and the little plastic bin attached to the front of his door had been useless ever since Tim had tried to play basketball with it nearly a year previous. Desk, therefore, was his best option. He'd be quick about it, and with any luck, there'd be no fuss.

By the time Martin realized that there _was_ a light on inside -- to say nothing of what it illuminated -- it was too late. The door was open, and Martin could not have hoped to hide his presence. He'd been right about the overhead lights, but the green-shaded bankers lamp he often read by shone nearly a spotlight on Jon's desk chair, and Jon in it.

Over the past few months, Jon's appearance had grown steadily more disheveled, his clothes often rumpled and his hair shaggy. The man before Martin was so far beyond disheveled now, though, he was outright debauched. He was slumped back in his office chair, one leg hooked over the padded arm, panting hard as his hand worked furiously at his swollen cock. The tightness in his brow, though, was so deep it looked less like arousal than like absolute frustration, which was the only part of the way he looked for which Martin's experience _did_ have some reference.

In any case, Jon was so intent on his unthinkable task that he actually managed not to notice Martin for a moment, even stood frozen in the doorway as he was, staring pretty much bug-eyed and slack-jawed at the entire situation. Finally, though, Jon's eyes opened with a feverish glitter and darted to the doorway, and then went round behind his glasses. He swore and flailed abruptly into a scramble of limbs as he tried to spin himself away in his chair, and in spite of literally everything, Martin found himself taking a step forward into the office with his hand out, just in fear of Jon upsetting himself into serious injury.

"Sorry!" somehow blurted itself out his mouth while he moved, though, because of course it did. "Oh God, _sorry_ , I--"

"Shut the door," Jon panted, from somewhere in the protective hunch he'd wound up in. His eyes were squeezed shut and hands knotted into fists, and he still looked more hunted than worked up or even embarrassed.

Martin swallowed as best he could, considering how his whole mouth and throat had gone hysterically dry. "Um," he managed eloquently. "On, ah ... which side should I be?"

Jon laughed then, a sound so tense and brittle, it would have shattered if dropped. "Whichever you prefer?"

All good sense and decorum and propriety and professionalism and all those other nice things _absolutely_ demanded that Martin step back out before closing the door to Jon's office, leaving a barrier of plywood and plausible deniability between the two of them. Martin stepped inside, then leaned back against the door, trusting his weight to shut it and its weight to hold him up. Fortunately, neither fell.

Jon exhaled in a great relieved sigh. "Oh thank God." He leaned forward, bracing himself against his desk with one hand while the other clenched and unclenched on his knee. He was actually _writhing_ in his chair in spite of plainly trying to suppress it, Martin was scandalised to the point of faintness to note. "There was a statement, and I ... I've _tried_ , but I ... I just _can't_."

Just can't _stop?_ was Martin's first interpretation of the dilemma. But no, seeing the sweat beading across Jon's brow, the painful-looking hardness of his cock where it was still just barely visible, Martin realized that the problem was that Jon couldn't _get off_. Whatever had worked him into this state didn't seem keen to release him from it anytime soon, leaving him in a state of needy arousal with no obvious way out.

"I, ah--" Jon licked his lips and pressed his eyes shut, as though pressing through the shame of being caught in such a vulnerable position. "I think I ... this sounds so ridiculous to say, I'm so sorry, but I ... I need to get _fucked_." His hand crept in to press against his erection, helplessly, making him moan with a noise that Martin felt all the way down to the tips of his toes. "I need ... I don't think I can without it, and ... could you...?"

"Could I ... _oh_!" Martin's eyes went wide -- and yet, he felt as though the world had suddenly clicked back into manageability. Accidentally stumbling in on his masturbating immediate supervisor and long-time crush was paralytic nightmare fuel. Accidentally stumbling in on his masturbating immediate supervisor and long-time crush _and then being asked to help_? Well, that was something he could do something about! "Yeah, of course, I--"

Jon let out another whimper of relief. "You don't _have_ to," he managed, a protest somewhere between politeness and desperation. "If not, I can surely take find a way to take care of--"

"Jon!" Martin dropped the files he'd been delivering onto the nearest chair, glad to be free of their weight, and ducked his head out from under the strap of his messenger bag. The contents of the bag were little better-organized than Gertrude had left the Archives, but like the Archives themselves, contained a multitude of wonders. "All right, here, I've got some..." He crossed the small office, then plopped the bag down atop Jon's desk, making it easier to rummage through its contents. "I've got an ex who's _really_ into the public health educator thing," Martin explained as he dug down through strata of his life, "and he co-organized a street fair sort of do about a month ago, so I told him, yeah, okay, I'd stop by, show my support for the health of the community! And all that." He _knew_ it was nervous babble, but both he and Jon seemed at the moment to be helpless in the face of their own reactions. "And as it turns out, when you go to these things, you get ... well, you get quite a bit of confetti thrown on you, since they don't do glitter anymore, what with bad for the fish and the ocean and all, but you _do_ also get..." Triumphantly, his hand closed around a clutch of small packets that had wormed their way all the way to the bottom of his bag. He pulled them up and displayed to Jon two condoms, a dental dam (which he'd taken to be polite), and several different kinds of lube. "Samples!"

Jon's tense curl over his troublesome cock hadn't loosened much at all, but the expression on his face had softened when Martin looked at it -- into something like wonder and something else Martin didn't dare suspect was fondness. "Of course," he said, on a faint breath of a laugh, "of _course_ you would have lube with you because you were doing something nice for someone."

The words themselves sounded almost like a tease, and nearly a mean one at that, but the look in Jon's eyes told Martin exactly how it had been meant. Martin felt a flush rise to his cheeks, then did his best to beat it back. Now was not the time to get distracted by getting his hopes up about anything. There was a problem in the Archives, and Martin Blackwood was uniquely qualified, for once in his tenure, to solve it.

At Martin's instruction, Jon stood and shed his trousers and pants down to his ankles, then bent forward over his desk. It seemed a little like improper use of work furniture, but absent a real bed, it was the best solution. Jon was all but whimpering now, bracing himself against the desk as Martin squeezed what he determined to be the _least_ novelty of the lube options onto his fingers. Thankful as ever for his habitually warm hands, he squeezed his fist together for only a moment to bring the silicone liquid to temperature. "You okay?" Martin asked as he brushed his dry hand over the smooth small of Jon's lower back, pushing the hem of Jon's shirt out of the way.

Jon nodded feverishly. "Yes," he murmured. " _Please_."

"All right." Slowly, with attentive care, Martin slipped in his slicked-up index finger to his first knuckle. At the intrusion, Jon's muscles all tensed almost vise-tight. "Easy, easy," Martin murmured, leaning as much of his body as he could against Jon, given the needs of positioning for penetration. "Breathe."

"I'm fine," Jon echoed, then took an audible breath. His shoulders repositioned, but nothing unclenched.

Martin frowned. "Have you ... have you ever done this before?" he finally thought to ask. Martin wouldn't have described his own sexual history as considerable, but even so, the partners he'd had before had all been more experienced than he. Introducing someone to the delightful world of anal penetration was undoubtedly above his skill level. And if this was the reaction Jon gave just to the warmup, Martin didn't know how he'd handle a main event.

"No, but--" Jon exhaled, then turned to look at Martin. The desperation in his eyes hit Martin almost physically. "Please," he said again. "I _need_ it."

Good sense told Martin that this was the _perfect_ time to throw on the brakes, take three rational steps back, and assess the situation like adults instead of horny teenagers. Martin told good sense to go to hell. "Then _relax_ ," Martin said, his voice suddenly forceful. He put his hand against Jon's back, right between his shoulderblades, and eased his top half down against the desk. With his body bent at a sharper angle, Jon's ass (and it was _indeed_ a bony one, and Tim had received a number of whacks upside his head from Martin for pointing it out) proved more accommodating.

Jon moaned prettily as Martin's whole finger fit inside of him. "Please," he murmured, nodding. For a man who complained about the cold so often, Jon was burning hot inside. Martin withdrew his finger partway, then pushed it back in, earning an obscene moan from between Jon's lips. "Yes, _please_."

Martin loosened Jon up slowly for another minute or so, getting him used to the strange intimacy of penetration, then added a second finger. That stretch made Jon's knees buckle, to where nearly all of his weight was being supported by his desk. "I've got you," Martin promised, slipping both of his digits inside. His fingers were as long and thick as the rest of him, and he knew that two of them were nothing to sneeze at, especially for a beginner. "Do you ... _do_ you want more?

For a moment, Jon seemed to be giving the offer serious consideration, and Martin wondered just what kind of a state that statement had left Jon in. How much did he think he needed to be satisfied? Would Jon know when enough was enough, or would it be up to Martin to draw that line?

At last, though, Jon just shook his head. "This is ... this is enough," he half-mumbled into the papers atop his desk. "This is enough, just, please, _more_."

That was a kind of 'more' that Martin could give. Pressing his fingers together, he began to work his hand up to a penetrating rhythm. His thrusts were shallow enough, but between the thinning lube (Martin had to remember _not_ to buy that brand in the future) and the tightness of Jon's entrance, he worked up a pleasant friction that had Jon gasping and moaning. Despite how the height of the desk made it awkward, Martin could feel Jon pushing his ass up into Martin's hand, urging him deeper, and making room for his hand to fumble under himself and back to his overworked cock. Based on the loud cry that tore out of Jon and the fury with which he resumed stroking, Martin decided that sensation was better than caution. They could sort the specifics of this out later. Right now, like he'd said, Jon needed to get fucked.

After barely a minute of this, Jon arched his back and pressed his forehead to the desk, then came explosively. "Fuck! Fuck me, yes," Jon cried out, though Martin couldn't imagine he even fully knew he was voicing those thoughts. The relief that shuddered through his body was palpable. Martin didn't know how long Jon had been knotted up like that before Martin had arrived, or how frightening that unrelievable tension had been, but it was over now. Thanks to Martin's literal interventions, Jon would be all right.

Which left only the awkward bits.

Thanking the heavens for seasonal allergies, Martin snatched with one hand a tissue from the box of them atop Jon's desk, while he let his other slip wetly from Jon's ass. Jon barely moved, panting in a boneless sprawl across his desk while Martin gave himself a wipe off. "Um," he said, hesitating; Jon could do with a wipe himself, but it was no longer certain whether that was crossing a line of intimacy or not. "Are you... okay?"

At first Jon just nodded, with his eyes still closed, his head disturbing a few papers across the desk. Then he swallowed deeply and began pushing himself upright, with a slight visible tremble in his arms. "Yes, I'm--"

He cut off there, though, grimacing as gravity's effects on him shifted, and reached for the tissues himself in a blessed answer to Martin's indecision. Martin averted his eyes as best he could as Jon scrubbed at his arse, and then Jon was pulling his trousers back on, clearing his throat like he also hadn't the slightest idea what to say. 

"Do you want--" Jon started again, as he turned to face Martin, but he seemed to have to stop there before he could force his gaze up to Martin's. Instead of discomfort or distaste, though, it turned out to be full of that same vulnerable softness again somehow, and the sight of it on _Jon_ was almost enough to make Martin have his own different problems with gravity. Especially when it was then accompanied by Jon resting a hand lightly on the waist of Martin's trousers. "Would you like me to...?"

"Oh -- I -- I -- uh--" Were words even a real thing? Martin was suddenly highly doubtful. His voice was probably only audible to dogs currently, as well, which didn't help. "Do... _you_... want to?"

"Yes?" Jon said, almost at once, on an embarrassed little breathy laugh -- bringing the number of unimaginable things that had happened to Martin today to a new record-breaking total. "Yes. If that's, ah. All right." Whatever his searching look found in Martin's face seemed to say it was, though, which was good, as no other part of Martin seemed capable of saying anything. "Here. Sit."

Somehow space and time managed to sort themselves out such that Martin wound up seated in Jon's chair, with no apparent intervention on his part. And then with Jon was climbing onto his lap, kneeling straddled over his thighs, pressed up against his chest. He was breathing fast and his trousers still weren't entirely done up and he smelled like sex and the tea Martin had brought him earlier, and there was still no way any of this could _possibly_ be happening.

"Let me," Jon said, burying his face in Martin's shaggy curls as he went for the front of Martin's trousers. "Please?"

Not a force in the world could have stopped Martin at that point, particularly given how he was finally no longer able to ignore how shockingly hard fingering Jon had gotten him. Focusing on Jon's pleasure, Martin had managed to relegate his own responses to a distant concern, certainly not worth bothering Jon with, probably not even worth mentioning at all.

Such things were _much_ more difficult to ignore, however, with Jon's hand wrapping snugly around the shaft of Martin's cock. "Is this all right?" Jon murmured.

It was more than all right. It was so good, it was making Martin's eyes nearly cross. Whatever problems Jon had had earlier with not being able to get himself off by stroking alone, Martin was _not_ afflicted with the same dilemma. On instinct, he reached up to grab up at the back of Jon's shirt, absently grateful he'd taken the moment earlier to clean up.

Before, he could have been anyone. Standing behind Jon, bending him over his desk, fingering him until he came -- Martin knew perhaps not everyone in the world _would_ have done something like that for Jon. But they _could_ have. That specific act hadn't required Martin to be Martin, necessarily, and in that, there had been an abstract comfort, a freeing from his slightly disastrous baggage. Jon might even have been imagining that Martin had been someone else, and that ... well, no, it wouldn't have been _fine_ , Martin wasn't going to lie about that. But it would have been understandable.

This, though, was personal in a way Martin almost couldn't fully register, lest he explode. Here was Jon, in his lap (and oh, Martin was praying the desk chair was weight-tested to something suitable for the both of them, or the whole evening might be nearing an unpleasant surprise end), stroking his cock, smelling his hair, and absolutely, incontrovertibly having to deal with the fact that the person he was with was Martin. That Jon had asked him for help was one thing; that Jon had wanted to touch him afterward was quite another.

Jon pressed his lips against Martin's temple, such that Martin could feel the puff of every exhale against his fevered skin. "Tell me what you want," Jon asked, his voice almost pleading. "Tell me what I can do for you."

Oh, there were a thousand things at _least_ Jon could have done for him right then, and all would have been spectacular. But it was Martin's heart, and not any of his other parts, that pushed its way to the front of the line to answer: "Can you ... can you say my name?"

" _Martin_ ," Jon answered in a rush, tightening his grip around Martin's erection. "I'm so glad it was you, Martin. I'm so very, very glad it was you."

A cooler, suaver man might have been able to bear up under such sentiment, but Martin had never been either of those things. Instead, his voice choked in his throat, and then he was coming right in Jon's hand -- and all over their shirts, and his trousers, and probably even Jon's chair as well, making a tremendous mess of just about everything.

Except Martin didn't feel like a mess. Instead, for perhaps the first time in his life, he felt like everything was coming together.

Jon stroked him through his climax, then left his hand wrapped lightly around Martin's cock as it went slack. "All right?" asked Jon, his voice soft.

"Yes." Martin realized he'd been gripping Jon's shirt almost to the point of ripping it. He forced himself to relax his grasp, pressing his palms flat and open against Jon's back instead. "Yes, I ... pretty good, actually? Yourself?"

"Oh, I'm--" Jon gave an embarrassed little laugh as he buried his face again in the crook of Martin's neck. " _Very_ good, in fact. Especially if you are.'

It was perhaps odd to think, but Martin couldn't help noticing the way Jon fit just right against him. He'd always been more than a bit conscious of his size -- and if he hadn't been independently, the gay dating scene surely would have made him so -- and Jon was on the small size in most dimensions. Yet here Jon was, straddling Martin's lap in what couldn't have been a comfortable position on its own, all but purring like a housecat.

"And, ah, _especially_ thank you for being sensible," Jon added. When Martin made a noise of confusion, Jon brushed his thumb across the skin of Martin's soft prick, a bit of a smile on his lips. "You're not exactly what I'd call beginner-level."

Versatile by inclination, Martin still was more practiced at bottoming solely because more than one date had gotten his trousers off before and informed Martin, no way, that wasn't happening. "Well, ah, what can I say!" Martin gave a bashful little laugh, which Jon joined. Half of Martin had expected Jon to panic and bolt when all was said and done, and his other half had expected himself to do the same. That neither had -- that they could stay like this, comfortable and warm in one another's arms -- was more than Martin had ever dared hope.

"I mean it," Jon said as they fell back into companionable quiet. "I truly am glad it was you. When I heard the door open, my heart stopped, but when I realised it was you... I knew it was going to be all right."

Martin didn't wholly know what the proper response was to that. Instead, he stroked Jon's back, feeling the knobs of his spine through the soft cotton of his shirt. Jon took a deep breath and tucked his fingers just beneath Martin's chin as he continued: "I know how -- _difficult_ I've been lately. Even after you all raised your concerns, in spite of having the footage, and everything else, I still.... Well. I haven't been entirely fair." _No shit_ , Martin emphatically did _not_ say. After a moment, Jon sighed, and his shoulders sank with it. "I've lost count of the number of times I've told myself I couldn't trust anyone, these past months. But it's really just tonight it's occurred to me that, at least in your case, I felt like I needed the reminder. ...I _wanted_ to trust you. From the time that I returned to work, and you were so concerned and conciliatory to me, I... wanted to rely on that comfort, after everything that had happened." He let out a bitter little laugh, hardly more than a breath. "That was what convinced me that I shouldn't, in fact. The temptation of it. If that makes any sense at all."

It didn't, but Martin had no intention of saying so, especially when he was reeling so much under the weight of everything else Jon seemed to be saying. Couldn't possibly be saying. Instead, he joined his hands at the small of Jon's back, all but locking him into the embrace, making himself as much of a steadying force as he could stand. "I just worry about you," he said quietly, and Jon sighed again.

"I know. I mean... I think I do, now. And I'm sorry." Jon's fingertips, light and timid, just traced the soft curve of Martin's jaw. "It -- feels good, after all this time. To trust someone."

A wild thought passed Martin's mind, and he almost let it disappear -- but no, Jon had been bold, and now it was Martin's turn. "Would you like to go get dinner?" he asked Jon, his words practically tumbling out over one another. "Or come back to my place? Or get dinner and take it back to my place? Or ... something else that involves me walking out of here tonight, together with you?"

Jon drew back enough to be able to give him a deep, gentle kiss, one that made Martin's heart flutter. It was perhaps the most undignified situation he could imagine for either of them, given states of clothing and bodily fluids, and yet Martin would have been hard-pressed to dream up something better. Perhaps their lives were stranger than the lives of others, but that was all right. As long as they understood one another, 'normal' was completely overrated.

"I'd like that very much," Jon said at last, his lips brushing Martin's as he spoke. "...In fact, I could probably do with a bit of filling up."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Statement CWs:  
> -vaginal fisting?  
> -loving and consensual body horror?  
> -unbirth
> 
> Post-statement CWs:  
> -walking in on someone masturbating  
> -first-time anal penetration probably undertaken too hastily


	7. Plus One

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HI WE'RE VERY BAD AT RESPONDING TO COMMENTS SORRY but thank you so much, everybody!!
> 
> See notes at the end for content warnings for this chapter.

Statement of Emily Adomaitis, regarding an assignation arranged via a dating application:

I'm not saying it's a _great_ habit, but for the last year and half or so, every few weeks or months, I'll go trolling through my online profiles and find somebody for a quick hookup. I'm just recently out of uni and pretty new at my job, so on the one hand I'm not really looking for anything serious right now, and on the other I don't really know anyone yet outside my mobile. So it just seems like the best solution. I meet someone attractive, we have a nice time, and we don't have to worry about each other emotionally going forward. As long as that's what everyone expects, I don't see how there's any harm as long as I'm safe about it -- and I'm _very_ safe about it. Someone always knows where I'm going, we always meet first in public, I carry plenty of protection, and I've got all the emergency bail-out apps on my phone you could imagine. If I get there and I don't like something about the situation, I just walk out. I've done it more than once.

All of that is to say that you can believe me when I say there was nothing out of the ordinary about Joshua and Summer to start. They popped up as matches for me about two weeks ago, and their profiles were completely normal -- and not in a catfishing sort of way, either, it seemed like there was some personality in evidence. She was a little funny, he was a little nerdy, they'd been active on the app a while, and all that. I normally don't go for couples, honestly; you never really know what the expectations are going to be, and the dynamics can get weird and nasty sometimes, so it's always seemed like more trouble than it was worth. But I'd never turned off the display option, either, and I don't know what it was about these two, but they just hit me the right way. They seemed fun and relaxed and approachable, and they were both really fit in their photos, and they were apparently about my age and close by. I thought it over, and then I thought, why not? It could be a good time, and if it didn't seem like it was going to be, I could get out of it.

I messaged them, and we ended up meeting up at a little cafe a few streets over from where I live. And I felt really good about it right from the time we recognised each other. They actually looked as good as their photos, for one thing, and for another, they were just really fun to be around in person. I don't even remember now any of what we talked about, which does seem a bit odd, because we got deep into chatting and wound up staying there for a pretty long time. But I didn't notice anything peculiar about it at the time. We just talked about nothing important, and Joshua was very nice and flattering to me, and Summer made me laugh a lot, and by the time we were ready to leave and they asked me if I'd like to come home with them now, I was okay with it.

They lived about ten minutes away, in a really nice flat on the top floor. Much nicer than mine, if I'm honest. It was almost like a fancy hotel suite, you know? They had that decorating style where everything was very tasteful and minimalist and modern, and immaculate, so that you couldn't imagine how anyone could actually live there without mucking it up. I said no to the drink Joshua offered, for the sake of being careful -- I didn't think they were up to anything by that point, but you never know -- but I wouldn't have taken it anyway, for fear I'd drip on their super-clean white sofas or something. They didn't look like they'd ever even been sat on.

All things considered, it was a bit of a relief to just go with them back to their bedroom, and start talking about what we were all interested in doing. They both wanted to touch me, which I was definitely okay with, and beyond that they didn't really want anything out of the ordinary, or consider anything particularly off-limits. I just said I wanted to use condoms, and they both said that was fine, and were really nice and encouraging about it. So I was feeling good still, as we started kissing, first me and Summer and then me and Joshua, and we all started getting our clothes off. I just felt relaxed, and excited, since it'd been a long time since I'd had a three-way. It's always nice getting more than the usual number of hands on you.

Even when the weird parts started to happen, at first each thing individually was easy to ignore, or assume I was just imagining it. I mean, there was plenty to distract me. If I'm honest, it _was_ a good time, whatever else it might have been. Once we all had our clothes off and were in bed together, I ended up sat in Joshua's lap with my back up against his chest, him playing with my tits while Summer spread out my legs and went down on me. And it was really hot: Joshua pinching each of my nipples between his fingers, Summer's one hand spreading my lips for her tongue while she propped on her other arm under my hip. I was on the edge of bucking and squirming pretty quickly, but the arm around my waist held me firm and close against Joshua so I couldn't, which just made it all that much more intense. It was so intense, in fact, that it took me much longer than it should have to realise _that was too many arms_. But when I snapped my eyes open and looked down at myself, I couldn't see anything wrong. It was Joshua's arm; he was only playing with my nipple with one of his hands. That must've been what he'd been doing all along. Mustn't it?

In spite of that, I got carried away quickly. I came once under Summer's mouth, and then I was just collapsed for a bit shivering between them. They kissed each other while I recovered, and then moved to kissing my hair and my neck. After a while of just kissing with Summer grinding on my thigh, they got me turned round in Joshua's lap so I was facing him, pushed up on my knees while Summer reached past me to put the condom on him. My hair was sweaty and in my eyes at first, and when I pushed it back -- I could swear Joshua looked _wrong_. His face was different: it wasn't the face I'd been looking at all afternoon, or the one in the photo from his profile. It was another face entirely. I couldn't even have said what details about it had changed, he was still a nice-looking white guy with short dark brown hair, but... I felt sure it wasn't the Joshua I'd met. I stared at him, completely distracted, while he tipped his head back and closed his eyes, gasping with Summer's hand stroking his dick. But then he opened them again and looked at me, and -- I guess he must've taken my stare for being lust-filled, because he just smiled at me, all hot and hungry. But for a moment, there almost seemed to be something _knowing_ about it too. LIke he knew what I was thinking, and he was almost smug about it.

There was a cold drop down my back by now, taking me out of the moment more than a little. But what would I say, if I tried to say something? Accuse him of changing his face somehow, or something, while my back was turned? Maybe he'd switched out with someone else with me sitting on his lap all the while? It didn't make any sense. There was nothing I could do or even think, so I just took a deep breath and decided it was just my mind playing tricks on me. I was turned on and it was getting late and I didn't know them very well, and I'd probably just been -- confused, or disorientated for a moment. It was fine.

It was easier to forget about it once they both started running their fingers over my cunt and teasing at my clit again, anyway, and before long I was moaning and ready. I sank onto Joshua's cock, and started riding him, with Summer pressing up behind me over his knees and teasing my clit and my nipples. And it was really incredible -- good enough to get me past that moment of feeling weird and have me good and hot again. By the time Joshua leaned in to kiss me, I'd relaxed enough that I leaned into it too, and put my hand up to cup his cheek.

His face _moved_ with my hand. Not the normal way that skin and flesh is flexible, that it can shift a little if you press or push it. It _slid_ along the bones of his cheekbone and jaw -- like it was a layer of rubber, or meat, on a slick surface. Too fast and easy, and with a sickening oily feeling under the skin. I jerked back out of the kiss, startled, and my stomach clenched when I actually saw how his flesh had shifted, and stayed that way. His whole cheek had pushed up on his skull, so it actually obscured most of his eye on that side. The skin had just risen over top of it, and wrinkled in the middle, like rumpled fabric. At the bottom it had moved too, exposing his teeth and too much of his gum at the top of his mouth.

Only on one side, though. And the other side was _grinning_ at me. Like he was finding it really funny that I'd just noticed some practical joke he'd played.

I saw all of it for no more than a second, though, and maybe less. Then Summer was putting her hand on my own cheek -- startling me badly at first -- and turned my head to hers, kissing me deeply again. She kept working her fingers over my clit, slick and hot. It had all happened so fast it had hardly had time to put a damper on my arousal, and somehow, her fingers got me so worked up again that I couldn't concentrate on anything else, not even what I thought had just happened. I was so close to coming again, I couldn't think of stopping, so I just kept working my hips up and down on Joshua's cock, and told myself again and again I'd been imagining it. And I kept my eyes closed.

The second time I came even harder, and I just slumped against them both again, gasping for breath. I was pretty well fucked out at that point -- all else aside, I had not been going easy on Joshua -- and I just clambered off his lap to collapse back on the bed beyond them, letting them at each other instead. They started kissing, and laughing, and Summer went to take the condom off Joshua. He'd come too, but it looked like he'd only gotten a little softer, and as she drew it down off him, his cock, itself -- _stretched_ with the rubber. More than it should have been able to. It just stretched out in this long, soft, fleshy-colored tendril, away from his body. All I could do was stare, my heart racing again for completely different reasons, as it finally let him go and his dick just sort of... lolled there, all distorted out of shape. And when I looked back up at them where they were kissing each other, to see if they'd seen that I'd noticed, I saw that their faces had gone soft and shapeless, too. They were melting into each other, their features blurring out and stretching out, melting into just a confusion of vague wrinkles in a sort of funneled-together tube of flesh. Disappearing into each other until it looked like they were becoming one single thing, with nothing human about it at all.

I was terrified, but I didn't dare move, or even give any sign I'd seen any of it. I shut my eyes, and tried to slow down my breathing, so I could pretend I was falling asleep and not paying any attention. I could still hear it, though. Thick, wet, fleshy sounds that could have been just kissing, maybe, or Joshua starting to get Summer off, if they had still been "Joshua" and "Summer" at all. But I knew better. I didn't want to, but I did.

I don't know how long I lay there, concentrating on staying loose and keeping my breath sounding like I was asleep, while they did whatever they were doing. As hard as it is for me to believe, eventually I must have managed to pretend to be asleep for so long that I really fell asleep. I don't know how, but I don't remember anything after that, so it must've happened.

It was very early morning when I woke up, still before dawn. The lights were off in the bedroom, and it was dark outside, except for the over-bright glow from a streetlamp that was a bit too close to the window. Even through the drapes, it was enough for me to see as I sat up that I'd been sleeping in the middle of the bed, with Joshua and Summer asleep on either side of me. And they were just Joshua and Summer again, completely, as far as I could see. If they'd really ever been anything else. I knew what I thought I'd seen, but it was all so confused in my mind, I couldn't say for certain. And I didn't really want to know. I just wanted to get out of there.

After a few clumsy minutes of finding and gathering up all my clothes and putting them on again, as quietly as I could, I made my way out of the bedroom into the rest of the flat. I saw there was a light still on in the kitchen, and that was a bit of a relief, as the flat door was in there and I wouldn't have to fumble around to find it. I went round the corner into the kitchen.

Summer was standing there, by the counter, wearing a bathrobe and sipping a mug of tea. The exact same Summer I had just seen, with my own eyes, in the light from outside as I got up out of the bed. I stopped dead where I was, numb and frozen, and she turned to look at me.

She smiled. And all I could think was that it was so much like the way Joshua -- or whatever he was -- had smiled at me the night before, when I was sure his face had changed. Knowing exactly what I was thinking, and pleased as a cat that's just killed a bird. Just daring me to say something about it.

"Couldn't sleep either, love?" Summer said, making a show of keeping her voice down for the late hour, pleasant and sweet as could be. "I wake up at all hours myself. Could I make you some tea before you go?"

I honestly don't even know what I said. I'd be surprised if it made any sense at all. I was just shaking my head, babbling, trying to keep smiling and say no and excuse myself all at once without ever seeming as freaked out as I was, or taking my eyes off her. She kept staring at me the whole time I edged around the kitchen, keeping as far from her as possible, and smiling. Tracking me the whole time, like at any second she might pounce.

Somehow, though, I made it out into the hall and shut the door behind me, and nothing happened. I didn't even hesitate, just ran for the stairs and down them as fast as I could, and outside. I nearly ran all the way home, too.

The next day I didn't want to leave my flat at all. I just kept thinking about how nearby they lived, how we'd met in that cafe so close that I'd passed it a dozen times before. It didn't feel safe to be out on the same streets that they might be on: maybe just doing errands, or going out to eat... or maybe looking for me. I told my roommate I wasn't feeling well and shut myself up in my room with the blinds pulled, and tried to think about anything else, but my mind always kept coming back. Finally I gave in, and I went back on the app to look up their profiles again. I'm not even sure why -- maybe just to try to convince myself that they were real people, who existed, and maybe they were just normal after all.

Both their profiles were completely gone. I couldn't find any trace that they'd ever been there. I just stared at the app for a while... and then I remembered that I had actually saved their photos directly to my phone's camera roll. Just being careful again: so if something went really wrong with the meet-up and they deleted their profiles or something, I'd have pictures on hand I could show the police. I definitely didn't think the police would believe me now, about what had actually happened, but I did at least still have the photos.

They were just as I'd remembered them, still on my phone and everything. But the longer I looked at them, after everything that had happened, the more I started to get an unsettled feeling about them, too. They just looked weirdly staged, somehow, in a way I hadn't really noticed before. Too well-lit and high-quality for just casual snaps. In the end, I reverse image searched them, just to see what would happen. Maybe one of them had the same photo out there on a personal website or something, and I could track them down.

Both images came up with matches right away. They were all on stock photo websites. Both photos were stock photos, branded with big watermarks everywhere else that I found them. The ones Joshua and Summer had put up didn't have those, of course, and they looked like they'd been altered some from the originals: like they'd been put through filters or something, doctored a bit, to make them look less glossy and professional and a bit more like a picture a real person might have of themselves. But they were unquestionably the same photos. And they were definitely photos of Joshua and Summer: the people who appeared in the photographs were the same people I had met and had sex with the day before. There wasn't even any room for doubt in my mind.

I guess that's not completely impossible either. They could both have done modeling at some point, and each posed for those photos. I suppose that could have happened, no matter how unlikely. But then why had both of them given other jobs on their profiles, and neither said anything about modeling, when you'd really think that's something you'd say somewhere on a dating profile, wouldn't you? And why would the photos have been altered, so that someone like me might not notice what they were at first? But still not altered _so_ much that I couldn't find the originals? If everything had a reasonable explanation, why did it feel so much like they _wanted_ me to find out, and be exactly as confused and frightened by it as I was? Like one more smug, pleased way they were just toying with me, just to see what I'd do?

And why, in spite of all of that, am I still so tempted to try to find them again?

\------

Statement ends.

\------

Well, this was precisely what Jon deserved for deciding to just record a statement in Document Storage where he'd been working, instead of going back to his office.

Braving the hallways like this was entirely out of the question, he thought, rubbing his sweating palms desperately against his thighs and trying to breathe down his flush a bit. And the main storage space around him was crowded with shelving and cabinets, but by no means private in any way. There were a few small rooms at the far side, though, where older collections of paperwork were held separately and with more climate control -- including one tucked so far back in the corner it was entirely out of the flow of ordinary foot traffic. While it was dreadful to be contemplating any of this at all, of course, the situation was untenable, and maybe that would be just enough privacy to manage.

Unfortunately, though, when Jon arrived at the door and pulled it open, flushed and out of breath and straining at his trousers, it was clear he wasn't the only one who'd had that idea.

To think of Tim in a sexual context was hardly difficult. From the stories of his information-gathering liaisons to the occasional love bites Jon saw slipping over the collars of his shirts, Tim was perhaps the antithesis of Jon in how much sex seemed to be a part of his life. To Jon, the need was an inconvenience at the best of times, while Tim seemed to luxuriate in how close to the surface his own sexuality simmered at any given moment. Even in recent months, when Tim's resentments and traumas had come to a rolling boil, that charged edge of Tim's entire being had never quite gone away. So really, the greater surprise to Jon was that he _hadn't_ , prior to this moment, walked in on Tim making out with someone in one of Institute's many nooks and/or crannies.

That that someone was _Martin_ gave Jon more considerable pause.

At any other time, Jon would have been overcome with embarrassment and on his way out the door the second he discovered bodies on the other side, and never mind whose they were. Achingly hard as he was now, though, he found himself staring directly at them, unable to move. Tim had Martin back up against a tall shelf, pinned and pretty and gasping. The jumper he'd been wearing earlier had been tossed inside-out on the floor, and Martin's already-unruly hair looked even wilder for its having been tugged off. For a beautiful moment, Martin was too lost in pleasure to notice anything. His eyes were shut, his soft lips parted, while one hand clutched Tim's dark hair in a needful grasp.

Then a split-second later that felt like several years had passed, both Tim and Martin turned toward the soft sound of Jon's breath in the doorway, and their eyes went wide. Martin even gasped audibly, though it was hard to tell if that was from surprise, or from the way Tim's hand was already down the front of his trousers. Jon sputtered, but there were no words for any of this. He wasn't even sure how his limbs worked anymore.

Tim shot him a look that Jon was becoming increasingly familiar with: that expression of exhausted anger, like lightning looking for a high place to strike. Jon supposed he was _more_ than fairly owed that right now, what with his having butted in so rudely on something entirely not his business. Martin's expression had faded into one of absolute horror, and Jon could see that Tim's body language had shifted subtly, turning into a stance of ... protection? Was he reading that right? Was Tim protecting Martin from _him_?

The soap-bubble tension of the moment burst as Tim lunged for the door. Jon felt a surge of panic, all but certain in that moment that Tim was going to do him some great violence, and that he would deserve it. Instead of striking him, though, Tim hooked a finger into the collar of Jon's shirt. "Get in here, Sims," Tim growled, yanking Jon forward so that he stumbled, full-body, into the tiny cubicle and the door closed behind him.

Thrown off-kilter, Jon barely had time to establish his balance before Tim was kissing him, and kissing him hard, with more than a small bite of teeth to it. Instinct told Jon this was a dangerous situation he should try to escape, but Tim had such a grip on Jon's shirt that Jon wasn't going anywhere. Not, at least, until Tim's assault on his mouth was done.

To his not-inconsiderable surprise, Jon found himself eagerly kissing back. All the tension that had been gathering between them seemed to have been building to this explosion. This, from Tim, was a lesson: Jon was not forgiven, and might never be, but Tim could only be as angry as he was because of everything else he held for Jon in his heart.

He was also a spectacularly good kisser, Jon noted dizzily -- so spectacular, in fact, that for several seconds, Jon truly forgot that they weren't the only ones in the little room. That awareness came back as a second pair of hands came to rest on Jon's hips. Jon all but jumped with startlement at the touch. Oh shit, Martin. What could Martin possibly think of the turn this had taken? How was Jon going to explain any of his behaviour?

It turned out no explanation was necessary. With one last nip to Jon's lower lip -- one hard enough that it threatened to break the skin -- Tim let go of the front of Jon's shirt and spun him around, then shoved him straight into Martin's arms.

If anyone had the right to be upset about Jon's intrusion into this situation, it was Martin. If anyone _didn't_ have the right to be upset about _anything_ that was happening here, it was Jon. And that was why Jon hated especially the nasty little part of his brain that was fiercely and undeniably _jealous_. Of course he'd been aware of Martin's crush on him for some time now, but his mind had always managed to sidle away from the knowledge, into a polite pretense otherwise: first because he hadn't been sure what to think of it, then because he'd been twisted up in the suspicion that he couldn't trust it. Christ, he really had been more than a bit of a bastard, hadn't he? Especially considering that his gut reaction to seeing Martin in such a pretty state of pleasure had been resentment toward Tim for being the one to get there first.

Before those thoughts could do anything but wash over him, though, Martin was kissing him. Martin was not as bitey as Tim, nor as fiery, but the same sense of intensity flowed even through Martin's much gentler touch. Martin was cupping the sides of Jon's face now, bending down to correct for the difference in height between them. Then his hands slipped further back, weaving his fingers into Jon's thick locks before closing into desperate, needy fists.

If kissing Tim had been exactly what Jon had expected it would be like, kissing Martin was nothing close to his expectations -- and yes, this was the time to admit, he _had_ imagined kissing both of them before, in idle moments that had never gone much of anywhere except to fuel his self-loathing fire. Martin was not uncertain or bumbling, much though it pained Jon to think those had been his expectations. Instead, Martin kissed him like a man determined not to let what might be his one chance slip by.

Then Jon was startled by pressure against his back, sidling up and pushing him even closer against Martin. Right, Tim. How was it so easy to forget that there were three whole people in here?

Tim's weight against him drove his hips forward with it, making Jon's painful hardness brush teasingly against Martin's thigh through the muffle of fabric. Jon's breath shook against Martin's mouth, and he thought Martin's hissed inward as well. It felt... very good to be pressed up so tightly to Martin, in general. Martin's large and gentle hands carded through his hair, and every inch where their bodies touched seemed to flare with heat, both soothing him and leaving him wanting. Jon's hands came gradually to clutch in tight fistfuls of the lighter shirt from under Martin's jumper, where it had already come untucked at Martin's back, and his startled clumsiness in the kiss melted quickly into just as much eagerness as he'd had with Tim. Martin made a soft, longing sound in his throat when Jon actually pushed up on his toes a bit, striving to press their mouths together tighter and more wetly open, trusting to Tim's support behind him to secure him in position. That sound was something Jon was immediately greedy to hear again, enough to lick into Martin's mouth in search of it.

Their bodies pressed his tight between them: Martin's soft and warm and comforting in its size and solidity, Tim's trimmer and harder and thrumming with aggressive tension at his back. Tim's hands had started to roam over Jon as well: rubbing over the sides and then the fronts of his thighs, then rucking the shirt-tails out of his trousers at his belly with both palms. He craned his head in over Jon's shoulder to take another bite at him, this one quick and rough low on the side of Jon's neck Jon hissed and jolted, and then another hand was plucking down the buttons of his shirt, making him shiver first at the soft touch of each undoing, and then with the press of Martin's warmth to only his undershirt when it was done.

...Both Martin's hands were still in his hair, and Tim's around his middle, Jon only realised after the fact amid his hot and dizzy panting. Then whose -- ?

It was a question from which he was swiftly distracted, though, by a slow obscene roll of Tim's hips from behind. That grind left no mistaking Tim's erection, rubbing high on Jon's arse, and also pushed Jon's own firmly into Martin's thigh this time. A rather humiliating noise squeezed out of Jon with such force that he couldn't keep kissing through it, and he buried his burning face instead against Martin's chest, heating it against his skin with his breath. Martin kept stroking his hair with one hand, craning down to pant against his hair and kiss at his temple. The other, though, he finally seemed to dare slide down between Tim and Jon to the back of Jon's hips -- and used it as leverage to press his thigh gently forward just between Jon's legs, snug up against him. Tim's arms had now slid around and past Jon, as he mouthed at the back of Jon's neck where Jon's burrowing had exposed it, and his hands caught at Martin's waist, pulling them all in and trapping Jon in a vise of friction and pleasure that exploded all along his nerves.

Jon cried out louder than he might ever have imagined of himself, muffled in Martin's chest but not nearly enough so. For a wild second he was on the edge of coming just like that, but then he collapsed back from it with a small choked sob and could only grind against Martin's thigh desperately, completely unrecognisable to himself and shameless. Between the hands on his hips and Tim's grip on Martin, there was nothing he could do but squirm his cock up against Martin's thigh, nowhere he could go except deeper into chasing the burn of pleasure. They were all sweat-sticky and hot up against each other, moving and grinding, and it felt so _good_ to be between them, to have no inch of himself seeming to go untouched --

\-- and wait, that wasn't right, there couldn't be two hands on his hips, Martin's other hand was still on his hair, and --

What did it matter? Martin was shuddering around him, gasping breaths with his voice thin and high around their edges, and in this state the thick hard bulge of him rubbing against Jon's belly was just another shiver of excitement when it registered. Jon turned his head enough to lean on Martin's chest as he fumbled his hand to it, and he palmed his hand over its shape through Martin's trousers with hungry interest.

The sound Martin made at that was ... well, 'gratifying' put it mildly. "Jon," he choked, his lips pressed into Jon's hair. For never having been overly attached to his own name. Jon now wanted nothing in the world more than to hear Martin say it again. He pressed his palm even harder against Martin's _considerable_ erection, and where had he been hiding _that_?

"Go on," Tim purred just beside his ear. His breath was hot, and his voice was so strangely saturated with arousal it almost sounded unfamiliar. "He's pretty when you make him come."

The thought of how Tim knew that was one that made Jon himself gasp and lean forward against the soft wall of Martin's body. He felt Tim's hand slide down from his shoulder, down the length of his arm, until it splayed out over Jon's smaller grip, just at the front of Martin's trousers. Guided by the didactic pressure of Tim's fingers, Jon kneaded Martin's cock through his clothes, working him toward his climax.

At the same time, someone started undoing Jon's own belt, making a bid for what lay beneath, while someone else began to push fingers into Jon's mouth. They tasted of skin and perhaps soap and nothing else in particular. Jon closed his lips around them, letting them pulse in and out with the same rhythm he took up around Martin's shaft. "Jon, please," gasped Martin with a hungry whine that was barely his own. " _Please_."

Jon couldn't have refused if his life had depended upon it. He pawed at Martin, interlacing his fingers with Tim's. The hand that dipped below Jon's belt now wrapped around Jon's shaft, gripping him with fingertips a little too chill for the heat of their close quarters. Whatever Jon could have said at that was stolen by the fingers against his tongue. He closed his eyes, letting touch override all his other senses. He couldn't trust them, anyway. They weren't how he could understand something like this.

Martin came first, jerking his hips forward as he cried out (at what was probably an unwise volume, given their location) and clung to Jon with all his might. He _was_ pretty when he came, Tim was absolutely right about that. For Tim's own part, he was done almost as soon as Martin was, growling in Jon's ear and rutting hard up against his backside with a force that made Jon think of how much better this all would feel with their clothes off, skin on skin, nothing to hide. 

Then Jon was over the edge at last himself, spilling hard into the hand that held him. He came with such force that he might have fallen over, had the bodies on either side of him not held him so fast. As the fingers in Jon's mouth slipped back out again, Jon pressed his face against the rumpled mess of Martin's shirt. It seemed like a safe place to hide from whatever had to happen next.

When the moment broke, though, it was gentle. Jon looked up to see Tim lean across him, using their shared height to pull Martin into a tender kiss over Jon's shoulder. The strangest part was how it _didn't_ feel strange to be there between them. It had begun to seem possible that by opening the storage room door, he hadn't invaded on something so much as stepped into an extant space, perhaps one being held for him already.

Tim broke from the kiss to give Martin's nose an affectionate little nuzzle. This close, Tim looked so sweet and so tired at once, tenderer than the anger that had overtaken him in recent weeks. Something passed between them, some moment of communication Jon could barely detect, much less read. It made the hardened lines around Tim's eyes ease, though, returning a much more familiar smile to his face. Jon was startled to realise just how much he'd missed seeing it there.

Then Tim turned back to Jon, and before Jon could offer up any sort of comment on the situation -- a weak joke, perhaps, or an awkward stammer, or even just a flat-out apology for not having closed the door _immediately_ upon their discovery -- Tim was kissing him again. This second kiss was miles softer than their first had been, lingeringly sweet, far more lips than teeth. Jon moaned and held tight to Martin as Tim kissed him, and from the way Martin tightened his arms supportively around Jon's waist, it seemed he didn't mind a bit.

"I'll pop out first," Tim said with his mouth against Jon's, and oh, right, they were still at work, in a storage room, behaving in a _completely_ inappropriate manner Jon was sure none of them would care to have discovered. "Make sure the coast is clear, scare away any bystanders."

"Good idea," Martin agreed, combing his sweat-damp hair back with his fingers. He made no movement toward leaving and seemed to be in no hurry to let Jon go.

Tim nodded and put his hand on the doorknob -- then paused, looking Jon in the eye. "You know," Tim said with a smirk, "you're a lot more fun to be around like this." And before Jon could even take in a breath to reply with, Tim was out into the rest of the Institute, with the door shut behind him.

Which just left Jon the small matter of being disheveled, sweaty, and decidedly post-coital in Martin's arms, and needing to somehow decide what to do about it.

Martin spoke first, though, before Jon could make any progress with that task at all: tilting his head so he could meet Jon's with a gaze that was soft and serious and familiarly concerned. "Are you all right?" he asked, gently and less nervously than Jon might have anticipated. "I know it's -- late to be asking that, but... well, I suppose we all got a bit carried away."

Jon thought he surprised both of them by breathing a laugh, not to mention making no move to pull away. "Maybe a bit, yes," he agreed, and Martin tentatively answered his smile. "I'm -- quite well, thank you. ...Are _you_? I didn't mean to... I mean, I'm the one who was, ah, _intruding_ , and I--"

"Oh, no, no -- it's fine, you're fine." Martin's laugh sounded a bit helpless, like he didn't know what else to do. "I mean, it's not -- serious, with Tim. I mean, he's great, but -- yeah, just, you know, friendly. So it's not... it's okay. If you're okay." He appeared to take a moment to collect himself, before adding in undertone, "Suppose I'm just pleased he was talking to you. I mean, as much as he, um, talked."

Jon couldn't help another muffled laugh at that, even as he somehow wound up leaning his cheek back against Martin's chest. Now that he thought about it, he honestly couldn't remember in any specific terms the last time another person had _touched_ him, let alone held him. He found himself extremely loath to give up the startling comfort of nestling against Martin -- months of paranoia be damned.

"So am I," he admitted, in the safety of not meeting Martin's eyes. "And, ah... I can't say I objected to the rest, either." He thought Martin went rather still against him at that, and Jon had to squeeze his eyes shut to convince himself to press further. "In fact, if... you wanted to... try that again sometime...? Perhaps even -- just the two of us?" Before Martin could have made any response, though, Jon added hastily with a weak laugh, "And maybe somewhere a bit less, ah. Handsy."

That seemed to startle Martin out of his freeze and into a nervous laugh of his own, his chest shaking against Jon's cheek. "Oh, you noticed that too? Yeah, that's... have to say, I don't love that. Not sure I want to know what's being stored in here to make _that_ happen."

"Probably better not to ask," Jon agreed, smiling with his eyes still closed.

"Yes, also," Martin said on a deep inhale almost immediately after that, practically stumbling over himself in saying it. "To -- doing it again. Yes. Very yes."

"Oh, good," Jon said -- almost sighing it -- and that managed to get something like a nervous laugh out of both of them again. And then that probably should have been settled, and they probably should have at last pulled apart and started putting themselves together again and emerging to try to face the rest of the working day... but somehow, neither of them seemed ready to move just yet, even amid all concerns about extraneous hands. It was just entirely too appealing, Jon thought as he rested against Martin's chest, to stay close to someone who had managed to become so familiar.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Statement CWs:  
> -semi-anonymous hookup with discussion of precautions taken for same  
> -body horror  
> -canon-typical Stranger assholery
> 
> Post-statement CWs:  
> -walking in on people making out  
> -lack of explicit consent (plenty of implicit tho)


	8. Been Burned Before

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See notes at the end for content warnings for this chapter. (This one is maybe a bit rougher than average, too, though it ends on a more up note.)

Statement of Anika Kolbe, regarding her relationship difficulties:

Her name is Miranda Watson. The person who did this to me. I just want that to be very clear. I don't know if you can do anything, I don't even know what could be done, but I need you to know. I need someone to know, at least, and it might be nice if there were even a chance they would believe me. I'm not holding out much hope, though.

Miranda and I were in a relationship for almost five years, from my mid-twenties to the start of my thirties. She was a bit older than me, and more stable and financially successful, with a decent and boring job in public works while I drifted between freelance writing gigs. I won't go into detail about why we split up, except to say that it's a much easier question for me to answer than the one of why I stayed with her for so long. When Pritha and I were finally close enough to talk about it, she did ask me why I'd stayed, and I said "Inertia," like it was a joke. But it isn't, really. Or at least not completely. When a thing is draining all of the energy from you, ironically you run out of the strength to do anything but keep still, and let it go on draining. Instead of trying to argue against the things they say about you, you just give up and believe them. Instead of dealing with the endless stream of complaints and critiques about each of the friends and family you still see, you just stop seeing them. And you stay. The ship's falling apart so badly it can't reach the velocity you'd need to leave orbit, even though all the asteroids are here.

Anyway, it doesn't matter. I'd managed to not even speak to Miranda for two and a half years by last year, and it was an accomplishment, come to that. She's extremely outgoing and charming, from a certain distance -- I fell for her in the first place, didn't I? -- and by the end, the few friends I still had were really more ours than mine, and more hers than ours. I never wanted to talk about the relationship or the breakup with any of them, and she and I just went on being invited to all the same parties and outings and gatherings. To keep from having to see Miranda, I had to decline so many invitations that most of them just stopped coming.

I always stayed in touch with our friend Simon, though. He's just such a sweetheart and he stayed so unfailingly kind to me throughout, and he'd been a neighbour of ours when we'd lived together, not one of Miranda's mates from work or the gym. When he and his soon-to-be wife threw an engagement party, I was so happy for him I couldn't have stayed away, even though I suspected Miranda would be there too. It wasn't a certainty, though; I'd managed to avoid her so long that I wasn't even sure she was still in London. The only thing I'd heard lately was that she'd become a lot more involved with her church or something like that, which surprised me a bit, to be honest. I couldn't remember Miranda ever having been religious at all.

In any case, I had no such luck: she was at the party. I spent more of the night than I would have liked to ducking out of rooms that she was in, and looking over my shoulder in every conversation in case I needed to make a fast excuse. Finally, though, she cornered me -- before I'd even realised that she was trying to, that it wasn't just coincidence that I kept seeing her everywhere I went. I was in the kitchen, trying to find the extra corkscrew that Simon's bride-to-be Lydia had asked me to look for, and when I straightened up from the bottom drawer Miranda was just there, leaning on the counter and staring at me with a smile.

Of course there was no getting out of talking to her at that point. I feigned surprise, feigned distant polite friendliness, and looked for a chance to make my escape... but somehow, we ended up talking after all, and for almost an hour. And to my complete surprise, it really wasn't bad at all. Miranda really did seem different, somehow. She was pleasant and vivacious and charming, like she'd been when we first met, and she caught me up on old friends and asked after my career and even my mother, whom she'd always hated. It took me off my guard, and actually got me to open up a bit more, and even enjoy the conversation a little. When I did finally make my excuses, it was actually because I really did need to leave -- and Miranda just smiled at me, in a way that looked entirely honest, and said it'd been really good to see me. And just as I was about to leave, she looked into my eyes and said softly, "I just hope you'll find someone to love again," while she laid her hand on top of mine.

It was the strangest thing. Just as she said it, and touched my hand, for an instant I felt this incredible heat inside it. Like she'd touched an invisible switch on the back of my hand that lit a bonfire right in the heart of its flesh. I hissed and jerked as though to pull away, but there wasn't even time: no sooner had I started to move than it was gone. I stared at my hand and then at Miranda, but she was just giving me a puzzled little frown. There was no sign that anything at all had happened, and in the end, I could really only think that it had been just my imagination. What else could it have been?

I went home, and after a while I honestly forgot all about it. After all, it was only a few weeks later that I met Pritha, and we started seeing each other.

I'd been very hesitant about getting into another relationship, as you might imagine, but I had so few close connections still after all the damage being with Miranda had caused. After a while, I was just lonely. I started using a dating app, very hesitantly, but it was months and months before I actually had a good date come out of it, and that was with Pritha. She was a kind, lovely person with an occasionally wicked sense of humour, and we hit it off so completely on our first coffee date that we agreed to meet up again in less than a week. I can barely remember now what it was like for those first few weeks: feeling like my feet were always six inches off the ground and never quite touching, feeling _relief_ every time I thought about her and what we would do next. I'd genuinely forgotten that it was possible for being with someone to be like this. Not a constant drain or dread, but a pleasure. I was so relieved to realise that it was something that could still be mine.

For a while.

We'd been dating for a little over a month by the first time I invited her home. I know that seems a bit long, and it did at the time, but Pritha never mentioned it. We'd talked about Miranda by then, along with a lot of other things, and I know she understood that I needed to take my time -- she really was very sensitive to what I needed, and I was so grateful. It made it all that much easier for me to finally ask her back to my flat, and be excited and happy about what might happen instead of nervous.

I put on some music, and we had a glass of wine, and wound up kissing on my sofa for a long time. Neither of us rushing, just enjoying each other. It felt so good to be touched again, caressed, have someone run her hands over my hair and my body and tell me I was beautiful, treating me like something precious and sweet. I honestly started to cry a little, just a bit teary at the corners of my eyes, but when Pritha asked if I was all right I only laughed and told her I couldn't remember when I'd been better. And it was true.

We made our way to my bed eventually, and she treated me just as gently unbuttoning me out of my shirt and slacks, and smiled at me while I slid her dress off over her head. Pritha was so lovely too, all smooth curves and soft, delicate skin. She laid me down sideways across my bed and settled between my legs, and it had been _such_ a long time that I was already soaking, dripping onto the bedspread and moaning when she stroked her fingers over my lips. Her fingertips were slick in no time at all, and she circled my clit first around the outer edges, and then slowly settled into a firm, close pressure. It was so quiet, and she was so gorgeous: stretched out over me, warm weight pressing me gently down and keeping me anchored. Sometimes she ran her tongue over my nipple, and sometimes she was just there, looking into my eyes, stroking back my hair.

After she'd been touching me a while and had me gasping, I asked her to put her fingers inside me. She slid one in and worked it there gently for a while, and then added another, and that was so good, it was all I wanted. With her thumb crooked against my clit, I just rocked into her hand, warm and relaxed and safe, not wanting anything but more. She had me close to coming so fast, it was just so good to have her touching me and giving me this.

I built up right to the edge, all the sensation starting to burst and come loose inside me. And as I was tipping over it, shaking and rocking and shuddering apart, the one thought that bloomed out of my mind was that I loved her. Pritha was everything I had never imagined I could have again, and I had fallen in love with her, I wanted to stay with her.

And then Pritha started screaming.

I jerked and jumped, my orgasm sort of cutting off right in the middle, and more so with how she pulled her fingers out of me fast and hard enough to hurt. When she pulled her hand back, though, she clutched it up to her chest, still screaming, and I could see why. She had been _burned_ , somehow. Not a little, either: it was devastating, gruesome to look at. Her first two fingers had scorched down to raw flesh, blackened at the edges, and so had the back of her thumb. Almost the whole rest of her hand around them had been damaged too, lessening only by degrees the further the skin went from those sites, first raw and red and blistered right around the edges and then just shading out to an angry pink and then unhurt skin. Honestly, it had to have been the edges of the burn that were hurting her so badly, making her scream and scream like that. As bad as the central burn was, it had to have destroyed all her nerves at once.

None of it made any sense at all. What could she possibly have burnt herself on? I was totally numb and bewildered, just staring at her with my mouth open and heart pounding, trying to understand. It took far longer than I wish it had for her screaming and crying to pierce through me again, and jolt me into jumping up and calling an ambulance.

I stayed with Pritha as long as I could, but she was in hospital for a few days, and as I wasn't family I could only come during the day. She needed skin grafts and cleanings and intravenous fluids, and she was on pain medications so she slept most of the time I was there anyway. Or maybe she pretended to -- but that only occurred to me later. After she got out, I texted and called her every day to check on her, but she almost never answered, and she seemed distant and not to really want to talk when she did respond. I told myself it was a lot to take on, she'd suffered a serious injury that she needed to care for and she was starting occupational therapy to recover as much movement as possible, and I just needed to give her some space. But I think I already knew better.

Finally, she called me, and her voice shook while she told me she couldn't see me anymore. She told me she was sorry, so sorry, but every time she saw my number or heard my voice, it all came back to her: all the heat and the agony, her flesh sliding away from her bones until she couldn't feel anything at all... I kept trying to tell her I understood, I was so sorry, I wish I knew what had happened, but I was crying so hard, and she just kept saying she was sorry. It was awful. I couldn't stop crying for hours after we'd hung up, couldn't focus or get out from under the weight of my depression for weeks. I couldn't sleep. All I could think of was how much I had hurt her, how much being with me had hurt her, and I didn't even know why. And in the middle of the night, even then, a part of me would start to think: was it me? Didn't that make sense, in a way? Was that just the way I was?

It took me a long time to recover from what had happened, and even longer still to halfway convince myself that it had been something normal and explicable, even if I didn't really understand how. I told myself stories about freak reactions between the materials in my bedding, and actually got rid of it all and bought new sheets and a fresh duvet. I even started reading about spontaneous human combustion. It was ridiculous, but somehow it let me start to breathe a bit, at least, and feel like I could go on living my life. Like even if I didn't understand, maybe there was something _to_ understand, all the same. The more I felt like I could almost put my head around it, the more I was able to feel something like better.

Until it happened again.

I'd quit the dating app -- I felt too guilty every time I looked at it -- but I had started going out to pubs just to feel a bit less alone on the weekends, and I ended up making friends with Marybeth that way. She was fun, spontaneous and outgoing, and very unlike me. Given the state I was in by then, I didn't even give any thought to being more than friends with her until she kissed me one night out of the blue. We made our way into dating quite haltingly, her having to draw me out of my shell only an inch at a time. But she was so sweet and so pleasant to be with, and so persistent, eventually I gathered my courage and tried to put everything that had happened out of my head. I'd been lucky enough to find someone really wonderful twice after everything with Miranda, and who was I to scorn that?

So she won me over, and one night as we walked home hand in hand, it occurred to me to think that I was falling for her. And then Marybeth was on her knees on the pavement, screaming and clutching her hand, with the smell of cooking human meat thick and sickening in the air.

And it was only after that, staring at the ceiling in the darkest hours of the night when I couldn't sleep and couldn't do anything but think of the sound of the women I had loved screaming, that I finally remembered about the party. And what Miranda had said to me there, and the strange heat that had flared inside my hand when she touched it.

I don't know how she did it. I don't even know what she did, not precisely. But when I think of it, the oddest thing to me is really that I didn't think of it before. It's exactly the sort of thing she would do, if it were somehow possible for her. It's exactly the way she is. She has to be able to control everything I do in my life, even when she isn't in it. And anything that isn't her, she wants burned away from me. Just because she can do it. Just to show me she can.

I haven't been able to find her again, but to be honest, I haven't really tried very hard. Even if I did, what would I do? I know she'll never take it back. This is just how things are now, what she left me with, as surely as she left all that fear and loneliness inside me when we first split up. All I can do is see to it that, as badly as she's hurt me, I don't pass it on. I won't hurt anyone else the same way, now that I understand. It can at least stop with me.

It's so easy to do that, you know. I understand that now. Take all your baggage and put it on someone else, and break their life in a fundamental, irrevocable way before they even know what's happening. You can absolutely do that, if you decide to, and most of the time no one will even stop you. People do it all the time. But I won't. Not anymore.

Miranda did say once that I was the kind of person who just shouldn't be in a relationship. I guess it's finally turned out she was right.

\------

Statement ends.

\------

It only occurred to Jon as he was trying to catch his breath, gritting his teeth, to wonder why on earth Elias had seen to it he'd gotten _this_ one. It had absolutely nothing to do with anything he was meant to be looking into, as far as he could see. ...Unless, of course, it was just intended as a particularly cruel joke, under the circumstances. It wasn't as though he would put that far past Elias by now.

Thinking of which --

He grimaced as he let his gaze drop to the rise of his stubborn erection -- persistent even past the statement's far grimmer ending, to his chagrin -- under the soft joggers he'd chosen for their simple elastic waist. The juxtaposition of his heavily bandaged dominant hand against the situation did make for a bit of ghoulish comedy. Gripping anything with it was still an unappealing thought, even without the intended purpose of getting any pleasure out of it. He'd probably do better just to try to wait this out.

Unless it refused to fade without help, of course. With his luck of late, that seemed like entirely too much of a possibility as well.

Jon hadn't even quite finished that train of thought, however, when Georgie's voice from over his shoulder made him yelp and jolt nearly up off the couch.

"Not to be too personal, but is there a reason you're staring at your crotch?"

"Oh, I -- uh, I, ah -- " He fumbled, at a loss, even as she padded closer, stretching out her back and yawning. In the midst of his dilemma he hadn't even heard her coming in from the hall to her bedroom, where the nap she'd declared she needed had given him what seemed like an ideal window to record. Now Georgie had leaned on the back of the couch before he could think how to react or escape, though, and the way she blinked made him wince.

"Oh," she said, mildly. "Yeah, all right, that's a good reason."

Jon flushed, and pulled the paper statement he'd been reading from firmly over his lap, which seemed like the best that could be done for modesty. "Sorry -- sorry, it's not--" He caught his breath. "There was another statement Elias foisted off on me, and... apparently fear isn't the _only_ thing I experience vicariously from them."

Georgie glanced at him, her mouth tugging in a deeply familiar way. "So it was a _horny_ statement? That's a thing?"

"Well..." Jon paused, and then breathed a little laugh. "Sort of, apparently?" He took another moment to collect himself, and then started gingerishly trying to push up off the sofa. "Look, I'm sorry, anyway -- If you're up, I'll just, ah, go to the toilet a minute, and--"

"With your hand like that?" Georgie pointed out at once, and he couldn't help a pained sigh. "Jon, relax, I'm not gonna clutch my pearls and faint. I just don't want you to hurt yourself." She hesitated a moment, and then said, a bit softer: "I know it's not generally your thing, but would you want me to help? No pressure, or anything."

That threw Jon badly enough to knock all thought out of his head, and he could honestly only goggle at her a moment. "I... You really don't have to do that."

"I know," Georgie said, smiling at him just a little with an edge of warmth. "Neither do you, if you're not all right with it. But I am, if it would help. Up to you."

It was honestly beyond him to think of any way to respond to that for a moment. On the face of it, of course, it seemed like an idea so objectively terrible as to be comical. Having sex with an ex one was staying with, with whom things hadn't ended well in the first place, in the midst of trying to walk a dangerous line toward preventing the end of the world? Any two people who even considered it would be idiots.

...But they weren't quite "any two people," the two of them, were they? They never had been.

And somehow, what Jon found himself saying, quietly and honestly, was, "If you'd be willing, I would... appreciate that very much."

Georgie smiled at him, and managed to come around the couch before he could decide that it had been a mistake and change his mind. She settled in beside him, still in the soft shorts and t-shirt she'd been sleeping in, and stretched her arm around Jon's shoulders over the back of the couch. He went with it willingly, even gratefully, to settle onto the pillow of her shoulder, pressed comfortably to the rolls of her breast and side and hip. She smelled pleasantly like the slightly earthy humidity of recent sleep, and felt comfortably familiar enough against him to ache in his chest. 

Pressing a kiss into his messy hair, Georgie placed her free hand on his thigh in a way that made him think almost of a trainer trying to approach a skittish horse. "Just relax," she said softly. "Close your eyes and breathe."

Jon closed his eyes and found that did indeed help -- not because seeing Georgie was a particular hardship in any way, but because it cut down on his sensory input in general. Slowly, her hand moved up his thigh, then slid forward to cup his erection through the front of his joggers. Jon whimpered a little at the sensation, but he also nodded to make sure she knew the noise wasn't a bad one. On the contrary, it was pure relief.

Apparently spurred on by his response, Georgie slipped her hand down beneath the waistband of Jon's joggers and pants and wrapped her warm fingers around his shaft. Jon made another soft sound that was maybe a touch more pathetic than he'd strictly wanted, but now was not the time to worry about such things. Now was the time to feel good as Georgie's fingers stroked his cock.

They'd never done this before. Jon was certain they _could_ have, in the past, if he'd wanted it. It really had just never occurred to him to want it. They'd spent nights on couches in each other's apartments, leaning on one another while they made their way through whatever box DVD sets of television shows they'd taken out from the library, comfortably in one another's personal space. At any moment, Jon supposed he could have asked, and Georgie would have been only too happy to comply. But he hadn't.

So maybe this should have been the weirdest part, that they'd only gotten here _after_ their official, when-sex-was-supposed-to-happen relationship was long dead and dust. Instead, it felt ... nice. Jon didn't know if he'd ever before considered what a companionable handjob would be like, but he'd clearly found himself in the middle of one.

Jon was grateful that he wasn't really being expected to make any particular showing of sexual stamina here. As worked up as the statement had gotten him, and as good as Georgie's soft hands felt on his erection, he was never going to have lasted long. In fact, after only a few minutes of her gentle attention, Jon pressed his face against Georgie's shoulder. "I--" he managed, figuring the implied verb was obvious.

"I've got you," Georgie promised him, nuzzling his hair as she tightened her grip ever so slightly. That was enough to push Jon over the edge of his climax, until he was coming hard in her hand (and his own pants, for that matter, but that was a problem for Future Jon). He pressed his lips hard to her shoulder, crying out wordlessly as she stroked him through his orgasm. Just as the friction became too much, she wrapped her fingers around his shaft again and held him gently as his cock grew soft again.

For a long moment, the only sounds in Jon's ears were those of their breathing: his harsh and faster, hers slower and gentle. Every exhale of hers ruffled his hair slightly in a way that almost felt maternal -- which was _very_ strange, he knew, to think about someone who'd just stroked you off in their living room, so he didn't press the thought too hard. He expected her to move away from him soon after, perhaps with a chuckle about needing to wash her hand after a job well done, but when she didn't, Jon found himself grateful indeed. Justifiably or not, he'd felt abandoned by so much in his life lately. If she was offering to be his anchor, even for this small time, he'd gratefully accept.

"So," Georgie said after a long, still moment, "that sounded good, yeah?"

Jon couldn't help laughing, even as he felt a flush rising in his cheeks. "Yeah, that was ... it was very good. In fact. Stellar work. High marks."

Laughing, Georgie nudged his side. "Don't forget to add _that_ when you give _What the Ghost?_ five stars on iTunes," she teased, making them both chuckle. "Anyway, I'd say that went pretty well for our first time out, wouldn't you?"

"Quite," Jon muttered into her shoulder, though he still couldn't seem to keep the smile out. 

After another moment, he collected himself upward a bit, drawing in a breath as he gestured very vaguely in her direction. "Do you...? I mean, if you'd like, I could--"

"I'm good, thanks," Georgie said, though the smile she gave him seemed honest as well as being kind. "Just glad I could help." She even gave him a gentle tug back toward her shoulder, which he was more than content to go along with. And then they both just sat like that for a moment, in a surprisingly friendly silence, leaned together on the couch.

Now thoughts were tickling at the back of Jon's mind, though: old ones that nonetheless he found were able to knot up his stomach again now like they had when they were fresh. It took him a moment to gather himself enough to put them in order, in a way where he could actually push them out of his mouth.

"Did--" he began, before remembering that he was a bit of a nuclear question-asker these days, and therefore caution was advised. He screwed up his mouth for a moment, trying to think of how to phrase things so that he didn't accidentally compel her toward something she'd rather not reveal. He wanted an honest answer, but part of that honesty had to involve giving her at least the opportunity to hide. "I would like to know, only if you'd care to share, if that bothered you, at the time. How we -- how _I_ \-- didn't."

Georgie didn't answer right away, making Jon wonder why on earth he'd asked something when he knew the answer was going to be _yes_. But when she spoke again, she began by shaking her head. "Honestly, not really? What I remember bothering me most was how sure you always seemed that it _was_ going to bother me. Like it..." She tapped her toes against Jon's leg as she paused to think. "Like you were always just positive that I was, I don't know, _lying_ about being okay with you saying, sorry, but sex is completely off the table for me. And you know what? Maybe I _was_ a little bothered by it, yeah. But instead of feeling like it was something we could talk about, maybe work out something that'd be all right for both of us, it felt like ... like a bomb in the middle of the room, something I had to step lightly around or it'd go off."

Loath though he was to admit it, Jon supposed she'd hit that nail on the head. "You're... not wrong."

"And by itself, you know? It would've been okay, it really would've." Georgie shrugged. "There's plenty of reasons to stay with someone -- with you in particular, even -- other than sex. But it's on me too, yeah? I was kind of invested back then in being the Cool Girl about it, a real open-minded modern woman who's just good with anything and doesn't need anything herself. But I _did_ , though, actually. I like sex! I like feeling good with sex, and I like making someone else feel good with sex. That's not more important than how you felt, but it's not less important, either. So there was just this ... this _frustration_ building up, where I wasn't feeling wanted, and that sucked, but I felt like I couldn't be upset with that, or it'd be proof that you'd been right all along." Exhaling through pursed lips, Georgie rested her chin on top of his head, holding him close as she walked her way through thoughts that had obviously been gathering for a long time. "I just had this idea in my head that it was my job to _fix_ things for you. Not by making you like sex, but by making you like _you_. And apparently I could only do that by just only ever accepting anything you did exactly as it happened, and Cool Girling anything that wasn't working for me right out the window. After all, _I_ liked you. So maybe I could like you enough for the both of us, right?"

Jon shook his head, his mouth twisting into a sad little smile.. None of these were things he hadn't known, or couldn't have guessed if pressed on the issue. He'd expected that hearing it all laid out would sting, but honestly, like Georgie's hand down his pants earlier, any shame was overridden by relief. "I wish it worked that way."

"Same," Georgie said. "So I just kept throwing everything at the problem, without realising that the problem wasn't just a pit. It was a hole without a bottom. I could have dumped my whole self into you back then, and it would all have just passed right on through."

"So you resented me for that, and I resented you for feeling you like you had to try," Jon summarised, sighing. "It sounds so juvenile when I put it like that."

"Well, it was. We were _kids_ , Jon." Georgie ruffled his hair into his face. "Barely out of teens. It was the first real big relationship for both of us, and I don't think either of us was ready for it. Small wonder we blew it up in our own faces."

"May I point out that _you_ " --Jon poked a finger gently into Georgie's side-- "were the one who essentially announced to _me_ that we were dating."

"Because you were too daft to figure it out on your own!" Georgie said with a laugh, poking Jon back with somewhat less gentleness. "And because I really did like being with you then. We should never have been emotionally responsible for one another, but that didn't mean it was all bad. At all. If anything, the _friend_ part of _boyfriend_ hurt the most to lose."

"I felt the same way," Jon said, soft and twisted in what wasn't quite a smile any longer. It was awkward to feel like he kept just muttering a few words of agreement to whatever she said, but to be fair, what she said really did keep cutting to the heart of it. Was this anything like what it was like for all the others, to have every thought drawn out into his tape recorder? Certainly it was uncomfortable, but he could only hope for their sake it was anywhere near as cathartic, too.

It was a curious thing, come to that: how you could only realise how heavily you had been carrying something, and for how long, when that weight finally slid away. The grim certainty that the end of their relationship, and for a long time of their friendship, had been fully down to him had been something he hadn't even been aware of shouldering for years now. Not even that it had been just his own mistakes and poor behaviour, even, but that it had been the result of the fundamental essence of who he was. It was a semi-conscious narrative that had shaped more of his life than he cared to admit, between Georgie and his few disastrous adolescent forays into dating: that the way he was simply wasn't suited to relationships, and he'd do better not to inflict himself on the unsuspecting any more than absolutely necessary. If it was to abandon him now, he really wasn't sure what he would do with himself in its absence.

Georgie, blissfully unaware of all that she'd brought crashing down on him, was the one to break the brief silence. "Anyway," she said, settling in to lean back on him a bit, "at least you'll _talk_ about this now. Or listen to me talk about it. That's a change in the right direction already." Jon glanced at her, surprised, and she smiled back. "You don't _have_ to get out there and date again, of course, but you might give it a try. I think you'll find we've both grown up quite a bit since then. ...Although I can't promise you won't have to wade through six thick mountain climbers for every one decent sort you find." Jon snorted, even as Georgie paused a moment. Then she added, with a broader smile, "But... I know you'd like everyone to think you're just a tweedy academic stereotype who doesn't need anything more intimate than footnotes? But I know your secrets, Sims. Deep down you're really a big soft squishy romantic who wants somebody to be all swoony and stupid over."

"Slander is a criminal offence, Georgina," Jon said, as forbiddingly and as much down his nose as he could manage. It wasn't much, especially in the face of Georgie's bursting out laughing.

"And lying is wrong, _Jonathan_." He harrumphed, and she gave him an elbow in the side. And it could almost have been a complete change of subject when she added, casually, "You could at least try to keep in contact with your coworkers a bit more, now you can. Maybe that Martin person you talk about all the time?"

"I -- " But then what she'd said landed, and Jon turned to frown at her as his mind was wrenched entirely off its track. "What? I do not."

"Mmm," Georgie said, giving him an absolutely infuriating half-lidded look. "Just to be clear, that's the one who--" She raised a hand to tick on her fingers. "Makes the tea, got trapped in his flat that one time, has an ailing mother, speaks Polish though you never actually remembered to ask why, writes poetry that's not very good because he likes Keats too much, something about worms and a corkscrew that I honestly tried not to listen very closely to, and won't let you kill spiders?"

Jon's mouth had been opening to say something at the beginning of the list, but with every additional item it became a bit less so until he'd fully snapped it shut. Not to mention attempted to shrink entirely down the neck of his shirt. Only after Georgie had been looking at him and pointedly awaiting an answer for several minutes did he actually mutter, "...I may have mentioned him once or twice."

"Do you need help thinking of an opening?" Georgie asked, far too sweetly. "I know it's only a ridiculous podcast, but I've been a writer a while now, you know. I could help you out." She dodged around him and grabbed his phone up from the sofa cushion before he could react, pulling it smoothly up out of reach. "I'll just send a text for you, yeah? Give you a leg up?"

"You're a menace and a bully," Jon informed her, and made a valiant grab for his phone, which she let get nowhere near it. " _Georgie!_ "

"Now, which emoji to start with? Heart? Cat face?" She let out a mock gasp. "Cat face with heart eyes! _Perfect._ "

"Would you _give_ me that--"

She wouldn't, though, of course, and the ease with which she held him back from reaching across her lap only managed to deepen the insult to his dignity. Once it had turned into a full-on wrestling match, however, both of them wheezing with laughter even in spite of himself, the distraction of a little ignoble hilarity was one Jon couldn't bring himself much to mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Statement CWs:  
> -vague and brief description of a past relationship that is implied to have been emotionally abusive  
> -having to talk to an abusive ex  
> -canon-typical Desolation assholery  
> -brief description of severe burn injuries  
> -an abusive ex still being able to exert control over the survivor's life
> 
> Post-statement CWs:  
> -walking in on and clocking a boner, with associated embarrassment (Boner Clocking is the name of our new post-hardcore band btw)  
> -a pretty big dose of internalized acephobia, both expressed and implied  
> -frank discussion about challenges in a past relationship, some concerning asexuality
> 
> As always, you can skip past the statement and just read the post-statement without really missing anything.


	9. The Camera Loves You

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See notes at the end for content warnings for this chapter.

Statement of Alan Gillespie, regarding a series of webcam malfunctions:

When it first started, I honestly thought it was just an accident. I was sat at my computer at my home office desk, watching some fairly boring pornography, having a fairly boring wank. The sort of thing you do on an ordinary weeknight when you just want to get off and get it done with so you can go to sleep, nothing different from thousands of other nights. Except just when I was feeling like I might be coming close to finishing, I happened to glance up, and I noticed the little light was on that shows that my webcam's going.

I work remotely, so with all the meetings I have by videoconference, I'm _very_ hard-wired to what that light means. So to speak. I jumped and swore, and started fumbling at the computer to try to figure out what had started it up by mistake. There was nothing in my open programs that should have explained it, though, and I wasn't in much of a fit state for solving mysteries by that point. I should have just stopped, put an end to the whole situation and moved away from the computer until I'd composed myself, but... I really was just right there, and the idea of stopping even for a second sounded awful. It seemed like the quickest and simplest thing would be just to, you know, finish up, and then sort it out.

So I shut my eyes and tried to pretend it wasn't happening, and I gave my dick a few more strokes, and I came. I know that sounds mad when you're _not_ about to have an orgasm, but sometimes in the moment your instincts just get the better of you, and your brain can't seem to keep up.

Once I'd finished with that, and straightened myself up and washed my hands, anyway, I could come back and take a look at what might have happened. Even weirder, though, by the time I did, I found that the webcam light was off again. I was certain it had really happened -- I had startled badly enough -- but no matter what I did, I couldn't see any evidence that it had. The camera application wasn't open, none of my videoconferencing tools were either, there was nothing that should have started up the webcam. It was a complete mystery.

I did think of hackers at that point: you hear all sorts of things about the stuff they can do, taking over cameras and recording things for blackmail and the like. Ran all my antivirus and malware applications, come to that, although they didn't find anything either. I didn't really know what I'd be looking for, either, if I'm being honest. I did a few searches online, mostly frustrated myself, and finally just gave up on the whole thing. Probably it had just been some sort of glitch, and if it hadn't, well, there was nothing I could do about it now. I might as well just let it be and see if anything happened.

Nothing did for a few days, and I actually started to forget about the whole thing. At least until finally, I logged into my account at a video site, for the first time in a while. I don't have it for much of anything significant: now and then I put up some lyrics videos for songs by my favorite bands, mostly. Never really figured out how to make something more complicated, let alone monetization or anything like that. But when I logged in this time, just to check my stats, I found there was a new video uploaded that I hadn't put there myself.

Of course you can guess what it was. About a minute and a half's worth of my sweaty, doughy, slack-jawed face staring at my computer screen while my arm was jiggling off to the side, and then me swearing and clicking at things, and then me shutting my eyes and clearly coming. You couldn't see anything but my head and shoulders, you couldn't even be sure of what you were looking at or what was going on. But you could definitely guess. And _I_ knew.

The video had been up for days now -- since the same night it had been recorded, it looked like -- and it had been posted publicly. There weren't a lot of views on it, relatively speaking, just a few hundred, but... that was still a _few hundred_. A few hundred strangers having watched me wank at my computer looking like the saddest sack in history. And there were a handful of gleefully cruel comments that I could barely even skim over, but even from what I saw there could be no mistaking they'd gotten exactly what was going on.

I've never been an exhibitionist by any measure of the word, in the slightest. I don't even like people looking at me in normal situations, let alone in any sort of sexual one. My whole skin just wanted to cringe off my body at the whole idea that any of this had happened; I wanted to shut myself in a closet and never come out again. It was easily the most humiliating experience of my life to date, and I was shaking and sick by the time I'd hurriedly deleted the video and then my whole account for good measure.

Still... it could have been worse, right? The account didn't have my real name on it, and none of my family or friends or coworkers knew that I even had it. There was no reason anyone that I knew would have stumbled across it. Just... a few hundred strangers, who would likely forget about me and that they'd ever seen anything. And they _hadn't_ seen anything, technically. For all they knew, the whole thing could have been just a joke, with me faking it.

I had no idea what had actually happened, though the idea of hacking was still at the back of my mind. I took my computer to a repair shop, and explained what I was afraid of -- without any of the details, of course. But they looked it over for a few days, and then gave it back to me with a clean bill of health. There was no evidence that anyone had been doing any mischief with it, and while that didn't necessarily rule out malice completely, it made it fairly unlikely. I convinced myself that it had just been a horrible accident somehow, and tried to get on with my life and forget it. And for the most part, apart from a few sleepless fretting nights, I did.

Until one morning I got out of the shower later than normal, and I was halfway through scrambling around my bedroom starkers getting my clothes together when I saw that the webcam light was on again, on my set-up laptop. There was nothing up on screen that seemed like it would explain it this time, either. I was right in a position where I would be in full view, everything hanging out, but even remembering what had happened last time I didn't jump to turn it off or to rush off to one side. I just... froze. I couldn't seem to move, not to cover or hide myself, or stop it. And I know, I said I'm no exhibitionist, and I'm _not_ , but... as I was standing there, nude and staring down the eye of that camera that was looking back at me, I started to get hard. _Really_ hard, fast. It was awful, the whole idea of it made my skin want to crawl off me, but there was this terrible excitement to it, too. A sick, sour compulsion that made my pulse faster at just standing there and letting it look.

I saw the light go off on its own this time, after a minute or two of that. That seemed to break the spell, and my gorge actually rose a bit when it did, even while I was hurrying to get pants and trousers on at least and then check if I could find the recording, or anything that had happened with it. Of course I couldn't, just like before. But this time, I had the dread buried deep down inside me that this might not be the end of it.

It wasn't. I went through all my web accounts afterward, checking everything restlessly, and I saw it in real time when the video went up -- this time on my actual, real-name-bearing social media account. I sure as hell hadn't posted it, I wouldn't even know where to _find_ the video file to post it, I thought I'd looked everywhere on my hard drive. And yet there it was, even the thumbnail of it on my feed showing the clear image of me standing naked and staring in my bedroom. Thirty seconds or so of me just standing there like an idiot and rapidly getting a hard-on. Devastatingly, make-you-want-to-die humiliating, and out there on show to all my couple hundred or so followers, most of whom I knew in some sort of professional context. I deleted it as fast as I could when it posted, face burning up and hands shaking, but god, nothing's ever really gone on the internet, is it? Until the next time anyone reloaded their feeds, it might still be lingering there. Who knows how many plays actually happened before I got to it?

No one said anything to me about it, for a wonder, that time. I expect most people who actually knew me and liked me were kind enough to assume it had been an accident, meant for some much more intimate context, although that was just a ghoulishly hilarious idea. But I did notice that quite a few followers, people I didn't know so well and who had mainly been professional contacts, quietly dropped off.

The worst part, after that, wasn't the way the little webcam light hounded me, day and night: going on at the worst times, the most inopportune moments, whenever they came up. It was how I reacted when it did. My mouth getting dry and cock getting hard, as I held whatever horrible position it had caught me in, and just let it see, unable to resist that sour hideous appeal. How I even started to _want_ it to go on, in an awful, self-flagellating way, for it to degrade me the way I was increasingly sure I deserved, to be behaving like this. I started to _bait_ it to go on. Straddling over my desk chair with my arse in the air, humping the arm of it with balls and taint toward the camera. Sitting spread on the bed with my hips hiked up, shoving the slicked-up neck of a beer bottle up myself, because did I really deserve something actually made for the purpose? Spurting come over myself on camera, head hung down and crying with humiliation, scrambling off to the side and vomiting at the edge of the frame because I just couldn't bear it any longer. But under the sickness, _because_ of the sickness, always, was how much it turned me on. How hard, every time, I came in front of that eye, in the depths of feeling like the most hideous and monstrous creature in the world, stripped open in front of it so everyone could see the vileness inside me. Enough that the temptation to keep doing it, again and again, was more than I could bear.

And each time, it found a new way to share whatever wretched disaster I had left it with. I could delete things it posted on my accounts, so instead I started to get responses to emails I'd never written, texts I'd never sent. My friends from work, asking in horror and disgust why I would do this. My boss, coldly firing me with no other comment. My own mother sending me a pitifully garbled message telling me to never contact her again, and my father calling me later to scream at me how I was a monster, how she couldn't stop crying, while I couldn't even sputter out a single sound.

At least by now I think it's run out of people. One by one, it's gone down the meagre list of everyone in my life, and now there's no one left to show my misery to. I've got no one to lose, and nothing else, either. My rent's due on the fourth but I've got no job and no income, and no one's ever going to hire me again, that's for damned sure. There are also a couple of harassment lawsuits headed my way, from what I understand. When I can't pay the rent, the flat will be next before long, and I suppose that will be the last real thing to my name to go. If I'd had any sense, I probably would have already sold the fucking laptop.

I haven't, though.

I'm only stopping here on my way home, so that at least there's some sort of a record out there. So that I at least know that someone, somewhere, knows what really happened to me. I don't expect anyone to forgive me, not even if they knew all of this, but I need to feel like someone knows. Just so that it's not a complete mystery, after.

Instead of selling the laptop, you see, I went out today and bought a hunting knife. A good sturdy powerful one, meant for skinning and field dressing game, with a wickedly sharp six-inch blade. If it's the last thing I can ever afford to buy, at least I think it'll do for what I need.

After this, I'm going to go home and wait for the camera light to come on. And when it does, I think I'm going to finally show it everything.

\------

Statement ends.

\------

Martin was just doing his job. That was his entire defense. It was absolutely, positively, completely just his job. Or, well, maybe it wasn't _exactly_ his job, but it was certainly something everyone who worked in the Archives did, or at least it was something he _thought_ everyone in the Archives did, or at the very least it was something he knew damn well he had _permission_ to do.

So he'd listened to the tape of Jon's recording of the statement, just like he'd listened to the tapes of probably hundreds of Jon's other recordings before. He'd had to only half-listen to a couple of the more disturbing parts of it, especially the very end: it really was very graphic in a way that he'd never heard before, the words as shocking in Jon's steady voice as their content just made him feel ill. With his attention pointedly diverted, it took him a long moment to realize that Jon wasn't continuing after the end-of-statement pause to his customary follow-up details.

Except there wasn't silence on the tape. Instead, there was a strange sound there, something that sounded like shuffling and ... was that heavy breathing? No, surely not. Except that Martin couldn't think of what else it might be. Maybe there was someone else in the room with Jon, someone else that had entered silently but also after running a marathon. Yes, good thinking, Martin; that _clearly_ made sense.

Then the sound of Jon's voice hit Martin like a punch to his gut. When he spoke, there was not a single bit of doubt in Martin's mind that it had been Jon doing the heavy breathing: "Fuck it all, _fine_."

That was followed by the unmistakable sound of an unfastening zipper, and then a deep groan of bone-deep relief. Martin hadn't blinked in what felt like years, or closed his jaw in nearly that long. His entire body was frozen as the tape recorder's speakers played the distinct sounds of Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist, jerking off.

There wasn't anything performative about it, no strange exhibitionist fetish Martin had suddenly stumbled across. Something about the statement, horrifying as it was -- and it _had_ been horrifying, there were no two ways about that -- had keyed up Jon so much that he'd been forced to seek release before doing anything else. Jon didn't speak as he worked himself off, but the quiet noises of pleasure he made were nearly deafening to Martin's ears. There were some noises of skin-on-skin contact, but mostly Martin found himself fixed on the sounds of Jon's breathing. They were so soft, so intimate, and so _Jon_ in a way Martin could never have explained.

He should turn the tape off _right this instant_. For heaven's sake, it wasn't as though he were alone in the Institute, even at this late hour. He'd decided to do a little filing while listening to the statement, and though the storage room he was in afforded him a bit of privacy, it was by no means secure. Plus, there were still far more people running about the place recently than Martin was strictly used to. Someone might walk in, or at least walk _by_ , at any moment, and how would he explain himself then? He needed to reach over and press some button, _any_ button, and stop this nonsense right now. Yes, that was precisely what he needed to do.

Precisely what he needed _not_ to do was to let his hand shift down to the front of his trousers, which were suddenly feeling quite constraining, and begin to rub at his rather insistent erection. Yes, that was absolutely _not_ what he needed to be doing. He'd stop it any minute now.

The sound of Jon's orgasm was almost so quiet that Martin might have mistaken it for something far less climactic, had he not been listening with laser-like focus. There was just the little catch to his breathing, the sound of air held through a short silence, followed by a long and grateful exhalation. There was a small pause, a sound that could only have been Jon's licking his lips, and the soft, breathy growl of his voice asking, "There, you bastard, did you see enough?" Then the recording ended.

Martin sat there frozen, all his muscles gone rigid for the moment it took him to realize that, no, Jon hadn't been speaking to _him_. He'd been addressing ... well, whoever or _what_ ever was behind the million bloody tape recorders that seemed to follow him like seagulls after a cod boat. There was no way he could possibly have known that Martin was going to be listening.

And if Martin could have been listening, that meant _anyone_ could have been listening. That meant it was incumbent upon Martin to rewind the tape to the end of the statement, press the record button himself, and sit there with it in complete silence until that whole last bit had been completely recorded over. It was more than just some abstractly polite thing to do; it was the _right_ thing to do.

With great resolve, Martin rewound the tape approximately the distance of the ... er, post-statement material. After working in the Institute for a while now, he'd gotten fairly good at estimating time and rewind speeds, so as he hit the play button again, he was pleased to hear nothing more of the recorded text than, "--show it everything. Statement ends."

There, he'd timed it perfectly. The only thing left would be to hit the record button. He could pretend he'd done it on accident, leaned his elbow just so on the buttons; after all, if there was one thing Jon _always_ seemed willing to believe in, it was Martin's general incompetence. Just press the button and wait the few minutes necessary, and like that, it'd as though nothing had ever happened.

He would do this, absolutely. Just as soon as he'd listened through it again.

\---

It had... most definitely been this drawer. Jon was quite sure of it. You didn't record a truly gruesome statement, find yourself somehow aroused by it to the point of unbearability, masturbate to completion with a tape recorder still running, and then shove the damning tape of the experience to the back of your desk drawer until you could overcome the shame sufficiently to actually delete the last bit, and not remember quite vividly which drawer it had gone in and where. ...Although come to that, he supposed most people didn't do any of those things at all, without any sort of qualification at the end. How long had it been since his life had been anything like most people's, though?

He kept pawing through the pens and paper clips and scrap paper in his drawer long past when it was absolutely apparent that the tape was not there, though, for lack of any other way that he could bring himself to cope with the situation. It was honestly ridiculous, he had preparations for stopping a world-ending ritual to be getting on with and needn't waste any more time on a statement that had been intended purely for sustenance, but the longer he had to face the fact that the tape wasn't there, the thicker and heavier his pulse became in his hot, tight throat. He was still staring, thrumming with tension, when the knock came at his half-open office door, and he had to stifle a yelp as he jumped.

"Oh -- sorry! Sorry, I didn't mean to, ah, startle you." Martin -- a voice that could at least let Jon draw in a deep steadying breath and let it out again, before turning. Martin was still hovering by the door, a mug of tea of course steaming in his hands, before he seemed to gather himself to come the rest of the way in and deliver it to the corner of Jon's desk. He never seemed to quite look at Jon in the process, though, which was odd. "Just thought you might like a cuppa. I'll let you get back to it."

"Thank you," Jon said, entirely automatically, before sense snapped back into place and he lifted his head. "Oh -- Martin?"

"Yeah?" Martin had nearly made it to the door in the interim, all the same, at a pace like something was chasing him, and he seemed reluctant to turn back even when Jon spoke. In spite of all his other concerns, an unwelcome little lump seemed to be settling at the bottom of Jon's stomach as the awareness of how Martin was acting toward him truly sank in, and it continued tightening there. He'd been away quite some time, and everything they were planning was certainly stressful, but even at his worst last year Martin had never _avoided_ him like he seemed to be doing today. Had he somehow... But no, he couldn't get distracted by it right now, he needed to find that bloody tape.

"You didn't... happen to find a tape in my desk last night, did you?" Jon did his level best to ask the question as casually as possible, though he had a sinking feeling he wasn't succeeding in the slightest. "The, ah, statement I was recording yesterday afternoon, I meant to file it later and I think I left it in the drawer. Did you see it, by any chance?"

Martin didn't answer that right away, though, and appeared frozen in hesitation when he turned enough that Jon got a good look at his face. There were also now the beginnings of a dull flush creeping up from Martin's collar, for that matter, to start pinkening at his ears and cheeks. And suddenly Jon could feel a dreadful realisation in the process of hurtling toward his mind, on a collision course.

"Er, I," Martin was just beginning to say at last, in an unsteady tone, when at the same time Jon said "Oh God," in almost a moan, and pressed both hands over his face.

There was a beat of horrible silence. And then they were both trying to talk too fast at once, overlapping each other as often as not.

"I didn't mean to," Martin blurted out, and then immediately added, "Well, of course I _meant_ to, I didn't trip and fall on the play button or anything, but I was just getting a pen and it was there and I figured, I didn't _know_ \--"

"And there's no reason on earth why you would have," Jon finished over him, his voice hollow and echoey still sealed against his own palms. "Christ. I'm sorry. I'm _terribly_ sorry--"

"No, why would you be sorry, _I'm_ sorry! It wasn't--"

"--it's just, the statements, you know, you've read them," Jon was already cutting across him with miserable desperation before Martin could get going, though, "you sort of -- _experience_ , as it were, well, and he'd just been so -- _affected_ , in -- other ways than normal, that I couldn't... well, I _had_ to... I was _going_ to delete it but I couldn't stand the idea of hearing it again just then, and--"

"Are you okay?" Martin broke across that last, though, in a considerably softer tone. It was finally different enough and unexpected enough to make Jon lose his thread, and he let his hands ease away from his face to blink upward again. Martin was looking at him now with a sobered concern that was somehow even harder to look at him through than their shared embarrassment had been. "I just, you know, might have... had the idea that isn't normally something you _do_ , really, so I didn't know if... well. I thought it might've been rough, having it, I don't know, forced on you like that."

Several elements of that rather threw Jon off his stride, and for a moment he could only stare blankly before he collected himself again. "I... yes. I'm okay. ...Thank you, for asking. That's very kind of you." Not that he would have expected otherwise from Martin, but the level of consideration it implied went deeper than the ordinary. If nothing else, Jon was grateful to be so surprised and touched that it actually managed to distract him briefly from the matter at hand. Martin looked a bit flushed now in a happier way, and that was hard to regret either. "I'm just sorry _you_ had to have it forced on you. I don't imagine that's, ah, something that you bargained for."

"No, it's--" Martin stopped himself mid-sentence and took a deep breath, steepling his hands in front of his chest. After a beat, he continued, his tone chipper nearly to the point of mania: "You know what, I know just where the tape is. I can go, ah ... do a bit of editing. If you'd like. No worries! Just clear that right up."

"That would... I think that would be best." Jon exhaled, and then achieved something not unlike a smile, with the very small amount of dignity he could still gather. "And meanwhile, I think I'll just... pop into Artefact Storage and see if they have anything that makes the ground open up and swallow one whole."

That seemed to knock Martin a bit back out of his extremely determined cheerfulness, at least. He was startled into looking at Jon again, and then breathed a slight laugh that softened his expression. "Well, if they do, absolutely let me know," he said, and it was sheepish and honest in a way that made Jon's chest feel able to unknot a bit. "Can't count how many times that would've been dead useful."

Jon smiled, and inclined his head in acknowledgement -- of things both said and not. Martin hovered a moment longer, but he couldn't seem to think of anything else to say or do about any of it, and neither could Jon.

"Right, then," Martin said at last, and he scurried off before the awkwardness could grow large enough to crush them both. Which, as it happened, finally left Jon to ponder Martin's nonreaction to the idea that the tape had been an unwelcome intrusion at all.

\---

Martin Blackwood almost by definition had the best intentions in the world at all times. Or at least, nearly all times. At all times, it seemed, but this one, where he found himself emphatically _not_ having erased the incriminating part of the tape in question.

Instead, he was in the nap room again, the little space that had become so familiar to him during his short, worm-related exile from his flat. As privacy went, it was about the best he could summon for on-the-job dealing with certain ... problems that tended to, well, _pop up_ every single time he thought about the breathy sound of Jon's voice on the tape. And in the week since he'd heard it first, he'd barely had the wherewithal to think about anything else.

So he'd once again found himself in the little room, sitting on the little cot, one hand on the play and rewind buttons of the tape player, the other furiously stroking his cock. He knew how to keep quiet, just like Jon did, so the sounds of their breathing became a sort of duet. Martin had almost memorized the soundscape of the tape by now, learning by heart where all the hitches and catches and little gasps in Jon's voice happened. Sometimes he sped up his pace, trying to time it so that he finished at the same time Jon did, spilling into his hand at the same time the recorded Jon did, trying to remember to press stop before his afterglow was pricked by the jarring sounds of, "There, you bastard, did you see enough?" Other times he took it slow, rewinding as many times as he needed until he couldn't take it anymore.

He half-jokingly tried to rationalize it to himself as that he would just go back and forth over that section of the tape so many times that the quality would degrade appropriately, solving the problem for him. At the rate he was relistening to it, it wasn't that far-fetched of a scenario.

He knew he should feel bad about it. In fact, he knew he should feel _wretched_ about it. But he didn't _really_ internalize that feeling, that certain need for shame, until he looked up and saw Jon standing in the open doorway.

Martin practically levitated off the cot. He was certain that his heart had stopped forever, if not longer, while he scrambled to pretend he'd been doing something, _anything_ other than what he'd very obviously been doing. With one hand, he completely failed to stuff his erection back into his trousers, and with the other, he knocked the tape recorder off the side of the cot, so it just kept airing the incriminating sounds of Jon's climax. Well, Jon had forgiven him for everything after their initial conversation, it seemed, but that grace had surely come to its curt and bitter end.

Except that Jon wasn't angry. When Martin dared, wide-eyed, to turn back to meet Jon's gaze, he saw only ... well, something that Martin's brain told him was interest, except that it _surely_ couldn't be. Not here. Not from Jon. Not about _Martin_.

"Sorry, I--" Jon's voice was soft, almost a bit dreamlike as his pretty dark eyes fixed on Martin. How long had he been standing in the doorway? Had he been watching without Martin's noticing, and if so, for how long? (And had anyone _else_ overheard? was another terror he was wrangling, but that was a bit further on down the worry queue.) "I just ... couldn't help overhearing."

There was something to that statement both dangerous and exciting, and certainly overwhelming enough to get Martin _almost_ to forget that he was still clutching his erection in one hand. To the contrary, it was almost enough to make Martin come right there, and it was only the terrified pressure of his fingers on his shaft that kept that misfire from happening.

Without being invited -- which was good, because Martin hadn't quite summoned the wherewithal for speech -- Jon slipped into the room and shut the door behind him. He flipped the latch exactly how Martin had apparently neglected to do earlier. "Is that..." Jon licked his lips, an unconscious little gesture. "Is that because of the tape?"

Oh, Jon was talking about his cock, particularly its current erect state. Yes, this was clearly a thing that Martin could handle emotionally. "Yes?" Martin replied, sounding less certain of the answer than the question strictly warranted.

"I see," Jon said. And he did see, because he was looking straight at Martin's lap, and there was no mistaking what fell in his direct line of sight. "Is that ... usual?"

Martin ran over the question several times in his head, but it continued to make less sense than he would've liked it to. "You mean, because of the tape?" he asked. He glanced down to the recorder, which had run out the last of the recording and was now whirring through the blank end of the tape with a gentle near-silence. "S-sort of? Yeah?"

Without taking his eyes off Martin, Jon took a seat in the room's only armchair. According to its provenance, it had come in as part of a matched set, but as it _wasn't_ the one of the pair that caused anyone seated in it intense waves of paranoia, it had wound up here. Perched at the very edge of the cushion, Jon leaned forward and rested his forearms atop his knees. "Just from listening," Jon said with soft wonderment.

"Well, _yeah_ , since--" Martin took a deep breath and held it for a three-count before letting it go in a rush. "Since it's, you know, _you_."

Jon didn't look surprised, and Martin wondered if he'd _ever_ been subtle at all, one moment in his life, or if he'd just been walking around from the first day of his employment here with a giant sign on his forehead reading CAUTION: INADVISABLY IN LOVE WITH JONATHAN SIMS. It was hard to say how Jon _did_ look, though, if not surprised, as he let his gaze drop away from Martin for the first time so far. If only because there seemed to be so many tangled elements that Martin couldn't feel sure of any one of them: guilt, uncertainty, pensiveness, and maybe even fear. And maybe a sliver of something else, something that Martin absolutely couldn't credit at all, because it almost seemed like... _longing_.

"That's, ah," Jon started, and then he fell off, and left Martin to only guess at what he'd meant to say that was. Inappropriate? Strange? Ridiculous? Okay? Instead, Jon only took a few deep breaths for a moment, almost swallowed them. Then his gaze jumped back to Martin's, and it was more vulnerable and raw than Martin could ever have imagined it. "I think I like it?" Jon said, blurting it out all at once, stumbling over himself. "I think I like that -- you feel that way. Is that okay?"

Was there any possible way on earth to respond to that? Other than jerk his hand still covering his cock the one good time it would take to make himself come _explosively_ , which Martin only blessedly managed not to do because he was too frozen to move. A terrible high desperate sound came out of him instead, one that might have been a sort of laugh. "It, I, I don't, _yes_?" His voice cracked spectacularly at the end. "Yes. Yes? I mean. Is it... okay with _you_?"

"I honestly don't really know," Jon said, but at least it was on a helpless half-laugh of his own. There was a flush of colour darkening his skin further now, and his breath was quick. "I don't have the slightest idea what I'm doing. This is, ah... all fairly uncharted territory for me." He was quiet another moment, apparently struggling, and then he took a breath like he was about to dive. His eyes burned into Martin. "Would you want to -- see? Instead of just listening."

Martin made a thin high sound he wouldn't have called entirely human. " _Jesus_ , Jon," he managed then, choked and wild. Hopefully it was softened by the little burst of laughter it couldn't help but collapse into, though. Jon smiled back, at least, though it was self-conscious and more flushed than ever.

"In a good or bad way?" he asked, and Martin worked on breathing again.

"Good. _Good._ Very, ah, definitely good." He struggled this way and that a moment, and then just heaved out his breath as hard as he could. " _Yes._ If you -- yeah, I definitely would."

Jon nodded, still breathing fast and with his lips a little parted, but he didn't move for just long enough to give Martin the wild terror that it had actually been just a _hypothetical_. Then he seemed to decide something, and got up from the chair, coming over to the cot where Martin sat. He climbed onto it on his knees, and before Martin could stop having what might have been a small heart attack or consider what he ought to do or how he should move, Jon had settled sitting on Martin's thighs just above his knees, his own knees spread out straddling Martin's lap. He gave Martin an uncertain but unbearably _hopeful_ little smile, and then dropped his gaze to unfasten his trousers, and push down a bit at their open placket and the waistband of his pants. And then he'd drawn out his cock, carefully, in his hand, holding it and taking a long unsteady breath while Martin stared at him.

"You're -- you're hard already," Martin said in mostly a whisper, stupidly, before he could think better of it. He couldn't even have said why that was such a surprise, but somehow it was. He thought Jon might have managed to flush deeper, though his small shivery breath didn't sound displeased.

"I told you I liked it," he said, almost laughing somewhere between amused and apologetic, and Martin could only swallow and let his eyes flutter shut for a second. Only a second, though; even that felt like too much to miss. He looked back at Jon as quick as he could, and then up into his eyes.

"Can I touch you?" Martin asked. Jon considered that a moment, while still breathing quickly and with his _hand_ curled around his own _cock_ , and then his mouth twisted in a way that was apologetic again.

"I think I'd prefer if you didn't, for now," he said, soft and breathy. "I'll -- let you know if that changes, though."

Martin couldn't nod fast enough, stumbling over words. "That's fine, that's -- whatever you like. Anything." He took a deep breath, and exhaled it in a wavering sigh. "God, you're gorgeous."

Jon made an awkward, dismissive sort of sound, though he at least had the good sense not to argue. His eyes slipped lightly shut, instead, and his hand moved: sliding in a loose grip down to the root of his cock, then running fingertips back up lightly enough to make Martin ache in sympathy, watching.

"Feels a bit strange," he said more softly than ever, after a moment, "being the one _being_ watched, for once."

Martin's breath shivered in an unsteady little laugh, though his eyes never stopped being so hungrily fixed. "Fair play by now, I think," he barely managed to say, getting a breathy laugh from Jon in turn.

"Suppose it is." With his free hand, Jon braced himself against Martin's shoulder, keeping him steady and at just enough of a distance that their bodies didn't obstruct the view of what was passing between them.

As Martin watched, he could hear every sound Jon made, all the catches to his breath and little warbles of pitch. The contrast only made clear how poor the recording quality had been -- an imitation, a suggestion. Martin had the real thing right here, and he couldn't take his eyes off Jon. He wanted to touch him, but he kept his hands where they were. Whatever distance existed between them was something Jon would have to cross on his own.

"Is this okay?" asked Martin again, his voice soft as he stared. Committing every inch of this to memory, in case it was all of Jon he ever got.

" _Yes_ ," Jon almost moaned. 'Okay,' it seemed, was not enough of a word for it, not enough by half. Jon's tongue darted out between his parted lips, wetting them. He rocked a little as he jerked himself harder, grinding on top of Martin's lap in a way that was utterly obscene and about to do Martin in completely.

"Um," Martin managed, barely trusting his own voice. His cock was aching, but Jon was clearly going out on a limb here, and Martin wanted to let him control as much of it as he could. He could, however, provide a little feedback. "This is ... this is incredible, really. To see you like this. I never thought I'd get to." Hit with a wave of self-conscious anxiety, Martin bit back his lips between his teeth. "I can also shut up if you'd rather."

Jon shook his head. "No, I--" Breathing heavily, he leaned even closer, bending his head so that their foreheads threatened to touch. "Say it."

"You're beautiful," Martin said, because it was the first thing he could think to say, and also because it was the truest thing he'd ever said. "Sometimes I start staring at you and I forget what I'm doing. I knew I should stop listening to the tape, but I couldn't, because every time I heard it ... it was like I'd found a secret part of you, something that you'd kept hidden. But if I listened, I could pretend ... I could pretend that you'd let me be a part of it. That, even if just for a minute, you let me see." He took a deep breath and let it out in a heavy rush. "Please, Jon. Please let me see."

With a deep cry _far_ more resonant and honest than the one on the tape, Jon came all over his hand. He grasped Martin's shoulder for balance as he leaned his whole upper body back. Martin barely blinked. He watched as Jon's body shuddered with the force of his climax, then leaned forward again in a heavy slump. 

When Martin dared look up at Jon's face again, he saw there a winded yet satisfied smile. "Good?" Martin asked, feeling the corners of his own mouth tug helplessly upward.

Jon nodded, looking for all the world like he'd just run a race. " _Very_ ," he sighed, chuckling. "God, Martin, that was--" A thought seemed to strike him mid-sentence, and he glanced downward. 

Martin followed Jon's gaze to where their laps met. He supposed it was a bit of a sight to behold: Jon's softening prick and Martin's own semi-urgently erect one, all splattered with Jon's jism. In fact, just thinking the phrase _Jon's jism_ made Martin's cock jerk tellingly. "Ah," Martin said, suddenly reminded of what had gotten them to this point in the first place. "Look, I ... I know what you said, and that's fine, but ... would you want to touch _me_? Or should I--"

Jon didn't let him finish the thought, though. He shifted his weight forward and took the hand he'd just been wanking himself with, only this time he wrapped it around Martin's shaft. The touch was electric, and it was Martin's turn now to make noise. "Please, yes," he murmured, barely aware of what he was saying. "Please, I'm--" And then _he_ was the one coming all over Jon's hand, all over Jon's lap, while Jon watched _him_ instead. It was so overpowering he forgot they were at work, forgot the embarrassment that had preceded this, forgot everything except how good it felt to have Jon's hands on him.

He collapsed panting against the wall behind him, still twitching with aftershocks, and for a moment could do nothing but sit there and shiver. A moment later, though, Jon's slight warm weight leaned in against his chest, and Jon's arms tucked around his sides. Martin's eyes, which he'd let slide closed at last, opened wide again, but he hardly dared move just yet, all things considered. After another moment's pause, though, Jon made what might have been a small sound of disgruntlement and reached around to his side instead, picking up one of Martin's arms and pulling it in no uncertain terms to curl around his own waist. Martin was helpless not to smile, let alone wrap both his arms securely around Jon now that, at last, he'd been so clearly invited. As far as Jon's critiques of his performance went, it had to be hands-down the nicest one he'd ever received.

Apparently satisfied, Jon bulled his head under Martin's chin and up to his chest, and Martin tucked his head over Jon's, his shoulders in around Jon, wrapping himself around Jon as securely as he could. They stayed like that for a while, quiet, breathing out of rhythm.

Finally, Jon began to tug back a bit again, much to Martin's reluctance to let him move away. He didn't go far, though: only sitting back slightly on Martin's thighs, to where he could look up into Martin's eyes. His own were serious, considering, maybe a little worried. Then his brow smoothed, and he leaned forward, and Martin had only time to tell himself hysterically that they were absolutely _not_ about to kiss, before Jon was absolutely leaning in to kiss him and Martin could only meet him there.

It was slow and cautious, compared to the recklessness of everything they'd just done: a warm and deliberate meeting of their lips that only gradually relaxed and opened. Jon's breath was a hot light tickle on his skin, Jon's mouth soft and deliberate in exploring all the shapes of Martin's own. Martin's head swam and burned with it, his arms around Jon's waist clinging like Jon was flotsam in the ocean, keeping him from drowning.

They drew apart only after what seemed like both a very long time and not nearly long enough, to just a very small warm space between them. Then Jon let out a small sigh, and tilted his head in, so that again their foreheads were almost leaned together.

"I..." Jon started to say, and then paused, and finally fell quiet again. His voice sounded very small, and not at all sure of itself. He took another breath, and let it go, before trying again. "I don't know what's going to happen. On... either of our ends, really."

Which was as close as they should come to talking about any of it here, and Martin just nodded a bit to show he understood. ...And tried extremely hard not to wonder if Elias had been watching any of _that_ , too, come to think of it. Jon took one more breath, and tilted his head back a little bit to open his eyes. They met Martin's, and Jon fixed him with a small, uncertain smile.

"But, if it all -- turns out all right, somehow," he continued, haltingly, "then... be here when I get back?"

Martin stared at him a moment -- struggling with the apparent impossibility that Jon could actually be saying any of what it seemed like he was saying. And then, before he'd even really realised he could move again, he was nodding, breathing out on a bit of a giddy laugh.

"Yeah," he said, with more force than he'd meant to, and gathered Jon back into his arms on sudden overpowering impulse. "Yeah. Absolutely. I will."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Statement CWs:  
> -nonconsensual voyeurism/exhibitionism and humiliation  
> -implied self-harm/suicide
> 
> Post-statement CWs:  
> -accidental and deliberate nonconsensual voyeurism  
> -embarrassment  
> -walking in on someone masturbating  
> -consensual exhibitionism/voyeurism  
> -asexual person first-time experimenting with sex alternatives
> 
> As a point of interest, this chapter is the first of these vignettes we came up with, and everything else spiraled out from there. Which maybe makes it weird that it's such a combo-breaker!


	10. Ghosting

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again for the comments and all, everyone!! We are having a good time and very glad you are too. <3 ...AND NOW FOR AN ABRUPT TONE SHIFT
> 
> See notes at the end for content warnings for this chapter.

Jon had assumed that being called into Elias's office at this stage would simply mean having one more precious scrap of information meted out to him, most likely with a lot of patronizing talk about his needing to be "spoon-fed" in the bargain. Little though he relished the idea, he'd gone willingly enough, that being so. For now, they needed everything they could get, one way or another.

That certainty left him no idea how to respond, however, when he came in the door and saw that Elias was not alone in his office. The impatient questions that had already been forming on Jon's lips died away all at once, and he came up short as soon as the door had shut behind him, frowning and wrong-footed. Stood hovering behind Elias's desk, near the back wall with hands linked behind his back, was a man Jon hadn't seen before: tall and thickly broad, with very pale skin and eyes, both amid hair and a beard that might have been prematurely or appropriately white, it was hard to say. He was dressed finely if perhaps a bit oddly casually, and regarded Jon's entrance with what Jon might have said was an air of similar discomfort to his own -- though mixed with something that might have been amusement, as well.

"Ah, Jon," Elias said from where he sat at his desk, brisk and professional down to his smile. "Thank you for coming. As you can see, we have a visitor today." He gestured behind and over his shoulder at the man by the wall, without turning to look or check his position -- although of course, surely he didn't need to. "May I introduce Peter Lukas, who along with his family has the distinction of being among the Institute's most generous and committed financiers. Peter, this is Jonathan Sims, my new Head Archivist, about whom you'll have heard so much."

If Jon hadn't already been entirely without any idea what to say, that would have done it. Words and even breath seemed again to freeze up solidly in his throat, and for a moment he could only stare at the man ahead of him in silence. Peter Lukas, _that_ Peter Lukas, appeared unbothered, however: he only looked back at Jon with a faint smile, and a slight inclination of his head.

"A pleasure to finally put a face to a name," he said pleasantly enough. His voice had a surprisingly gentle cadence to it, almost kindly. His saying so made Elias smile a bit more widely for some reason, though who could guess what that might be? Jon swallowed and tried to school his tongue into some kind of sense, more by force of habit than anything else.

"Yes, ah, it's... Yes. I've... heard a great deal about you as well, Mr. Lukas."

"Peter, please," Lukas said, with a smile that could, possibly, by some, have been considered good-humoured. "No need to stand on ceremony."

"Of course, I didn't just ask you to join us for an introduction," Elias said, taking the thread smoothly before Jon could even begin to think of asking anything of either of them. "Since Peter has been kind enough to visit us today, and he is quite interested in the work of the Institute, I thought that we might be able to provide him with a personal demonstration of one of your primary responsibilities. Specifically, the recording of statements." His eyes lingered on Jon's, cool and opaque, even as he turned his head slightly in Lukas's direction. "Jon, you see, has been extremely diligent in attempting to correct the... organisational challenges left behind by his predecessor. In large part, he's concerned himself with preserving written statements submitted by the public, by means of duplication in an audio format."

"Fascinating," Lukas said, in a measured sort of tone. "That's a very generous offer, Elias."

Jon's eyes darted between both of their expressions quickly, but if there was any more to decipher there, he couldn't seem to tease it out. He still didn't have the slightest idea what Elias was playing at, or what any of this was meant to portend. At the very best, it seemed like an entirely unwelcome and frivolous distraction when he had matters of literal life-and-death importance to be getting on with, which Elias knew full well. And at the worst... well, he wasn't sure he knew or wanted to know what the worst, in this case, might be.

But even if he wouldn't have minded a bit any longer telling Elias exactly what he thought of this, under ordinary circumstances, Lukas was largely an unknown quantity, and one he knew to be very dangerous at that. There was no telling from the face of it how rude it was safe to be in Lukas's presence, or even how direct. And Jon didn't think he could exactly be blamed for being extremely cautious around known avatars of other powers by this point, given the circumstances.

Besides which... it was only recording a statement, apparently, wasn't it? Those were practically routine to him by now, unsettling though that routine could be. No matter what Elias might be up to, it was difficult to imagine how doing the same thing Jon had been doing on a regular basis for more than two years now could cause much more harm. If he just played along, maybe he could have it done as soon as possible, and then he could leave. 

So with a deep breath, Jon nodded, and took a step in toward Elias's desk. "I can... do that, I suppose," he said, and at least didn't bother to make much secret of the reluctance in his tone. "I assume you have one prepared?"

"Just so," Elias said, smiling more broadly than ever, and opened a drawer. He produced from it a sheaf of paper covered in handwriting and a tape recorder, laying them out side-by-side on his desk with precise tidiness. And then, to Jon's surprise all over again, he stood up -- stepping back from his own chair to gesture to it grandly. "Please, Jon, have a seat. It would be my pleasure to be your audience for this as well."

Jon opened his mouth again to protest, or question, or _something_ \-- but another glance between the look in Elias's eyes and the unreadability in Lukas's had him closing it again without a sound. Instead, he managed a stiff nod, and came around the desk in even deeper discomfort than ever, to Elias's chair. Elias and Lukas circled around the desk the other way (like stalking predators, Jon did not allow himself the absurdity of thinking), and took their seats in the two plush visitors' chairs that stood before it, facing the desk and Jon attentively.

So Jon supposed, with his stomach tight inside him, that there was nothing for it but to sit down in Elias's chair himself, and begin to read.

\------

Statement of Justyn Gorski, regarding his withdrawal from relationships:

I don't really think you can help me. I don't really know how you would. But I appreciate being able to come here anyway. It was nice just to walk in and have the girl at the front look me in the eyes and smile at me, and somebody hand me paper and a pen. I don't know how long it'll last, but I take what I get when I can.

It can't help but all feel a bit like a punishment -- I mean, it just fits too well, you know? But I don't think I actually did anything wrong, or at least not wrong enough to deserve this. So I like sex. So I find actual relationships to be a bit of a chore. So sometimes I just go out with a girl until we sleep together, and then when she calls me or texts me after I just... stop answering. Look, I can't be the only one. You have to test the waters to know if you really want to go swimming, and most of the time, I tend to find out I don't, that's all. I wouldn't be offended if somebody lost interest in me after the test drive, either. Not everybody's compatible, but having sex before you go your separate ways means at least everybody gets something out of it. And it's not like I'm so great a prize I'm going to be leaving a trail of broken hearts, come to that. I've just never seen the harm.

At least, I didn't up until Lisa. Lisa and I were going out a little longer than my average, a couple of months or so. She was all right, I suppose. Reasonably interesting, fun enough to be around. I have a hard time maintaining much interest in most people for very long, so I'd say that's a compliment. We slept together a couple of times, actually, and that was pretty good too. For a while there I almost thought I'd like to stick with her for longer, but finally it just felt like we were doing and saying the same things over and over, going through the motions every time we saw each other. I decided it was time to break it off. You never know if somebody's going to make a scene, though, and I can't stand that, so I just did it the usual way. Stopped calling her, stopped answering when she called, kept breaking dates or not making them in the first place, until finally she gave up. It's cleaner that way, you know? Lets everybody save some dignity. Although it's really surprising sometimes how long it can take people to get the message.

A couple weeks after I'd finally stopped hearing from Lisa, though, I realised that I'd left my watch at her flat. Normally I'd take that sort of thing as just standard casualties -- these things happen -- but the watch was different from a shirt left in somebody's closet or a mug forgotten in their kitchen. It had been my grandfather's, and I'd had it my whole life, it was really important to me. Of course I really didn't want to get back in touch with Lisa, after everything, but for the sake of that watch, I could muster myself up to go through with it. I couldn't just leave it.

So I steeled myself, and I texted her. And I got no response. Of course. Well, that was fair play, wasn't it? I couldn't even be irritated, not really. It stood to reason she didn't want to speak to me. Still, though, I couldn't exactly give up, so I called her. And called her. And kept calling her. She never picked up, and she never called me back, no matter how many voicemails I left apologising and clearly explaining the situation with the watch. And at that point, yeah, all right, I started to get quite angry. I mean, not wanting to speak to me was one thing, but I'd told her what it was about and what it meant to me in the messages, and presumably she checked her voicemails sometime. If she still wouldn't talk to me at this point, that was basically tantamount to theft.

Finally, I went over to her flat in person. It felt a bit rash, but at least she couldn't avoid me there. I went on a weekday evening when Lisa was always home, and I saw the lights on in her windows from the street, so I was quite confident that she was there that night as well. But when I went up and knocked on her door, there was no answer. And that was honestly a bit weird, it going that far. She didn't have a peephole in her door, and there was no way that she could have known it was me that I could tell. I couldn't imagine why she'd be just not answering her door. There was no chance I'd been mistaken about whether she was home or not; I could hear her TV going, though not loud enough to drown out the door, and her moving around inside.

Well, I'd come all this way, and I wasn't about to give up just like that. So I knocked again, and waited, and then again, and waited. I'm not proud of it, but I'd actually started yelling through the door by the time it finally opened, startling me back a step. And sure enough, it was Lisa there... but she was lugging a bag of rubbish behind her, not bringing the watch. And when she opened the door, she just looked right through me, and walked out into the hall right at me, with enough certainty to make me actually step back out of her way. She went right past, and down the hall toward the chute, without acknowledging that I was there at all.

Obviously, at this point I felt like this had gone past being childish and petty into being a little bit mad, and I told her so in no uncertain terms as I followed her down the hall. But she didn't stop, or respond, or even look at me. There was no sign she was hearing me at all. No matter how much I raised my voice or got angry, she didn't react in the slightest: just pushed her bag of rubbish down the chute and headed back toward her flat with her eyes distant like she was thinking of what to have for dinner, like she was just doing her own routine and not aware of me at all.

After enough of that, it started to finally go from just being incredibly annoying into being genuinely creepy. I was so unsettled that as I followed her back to her flat I started, you know, sort of crossing the line. Waving my hand right in front of her face, but she didn't blink. Grabbing at her shoulder, but she didn't seem to feel it. Shouting in her ear; she didn't jump. And increasingly, uncomfortably, I began to think that this wasn't just some sort of mad game Lisa was playing with me. She'd always been a more level-headed, mature person than I was, to be honest, even refusing to answer my voicemails had seemed pretty wildly out of character. Increasingly, I was becoming convinced that she _actually_ couldn't see me or hear me at all.

Partly to test the theory, and partly just because I didn't know what else to do, I followed Lisa closer than ever up to the door of her flat, and darted inside before she swung the door shut behind her. I know, that was taking it way too far, but if I was wrong _she_ was taking it way too far as well, and she'd done it first. But instead of finally cracking and yelling or threatening to call the police like she should have done, Lisa just went back to her couch and unmuted the television, and curled up again under a blanket, like she was the only one there. And standing there staring at her, watching her just look at the screen and sit perfectly calmly and with no interest in her surroundings at all, I think that was when I really became certain that I'd been right. She couldn't see me. When I'd faded out of Lisa's life, somehow I'd done it so completely that not only had she not heard from me, she no longer _could_.

I don't suppose there's any point to this if I'm not honest, so I won't pretend that I responded to this discovery responsibly. I went and found the watch first, of course, still tucked away on a nightstand so far out of sight that Lisa might really have just overlooked it. But after I had it back, I didn't leave. It was sort of exciting to watch her, even when she was just watching television and ordering dinner and reading on her phone while she ate, just because she had no idea I was there, or that anybody was watching her at all. Even when I got bored of that, I just wandered around her flat, investigating things. I'd been over to her flat plenty of times before, but never when she wasn't there and we weren't spending time around each other, and I'd certainly never had the opportunity to just snoop like this before. And finally, when she got undressed to go to bed, okay, I hung round for that as well, sitting on the edge of her bed completely unseen and watching her strip out of her clothes and bra and put on pajamas. I certainly hadn't broken it off with her because she was bad-looking, and I found it was actually very nice to just be able to enjoy how good she looked, without having to do anything about it or have a conversation.

Then she went to bed and turned out the light, and I was about to concede that I'd been at this for way too long already and it was time to see myself out and go home. But just as I was about to, Lisa shifted around restlessly in bed, and then got a vibrator out of a drawer in her nightstand that I had _not_ ever known was there. There wasn't a lot of light from the window, but enough that I could watch the shapes of her legs spread out under the covers, and her push at her pajama bottoms and then slip the vibrator down under the sheet. A minute later there was some surprisingly loud buzzing, and I stood there in the doorway and just watched riveted as Lisa sighed softly and bit her lip and squirmed every now and then. I had my cock out and I was stroking it before I really knew it, and we just both went at it in the soft, dark quiet of the room. Then finally LIsa's breath sped up and she tensed in an arch and then collapsed, and a second later I came too, harder than I thought I had in a long time.

I left after that, hurriedly, and I did feel guilty about it. I'm not a monster. But I also couldn't pretend that it hadn't been incredibly exciting: even just the hanging around her flat without her knowing, let alone the watching her get off. I couldn't get the thought of it out of my mind, for days after. I got a bit obsessed with it.

So, telling myself it was just an experiment, I started trying to get back in touch with some more of my old exes, as well. The same pattern, more or less: sending some texts, then making some calls, and then if there was no response, showing up at their work and following them home, or going to their flats directly and hanging round until they opened the door. And every time I did, it was the same as it had been with Lisa: they couldn't see me, and I could just slip into their homes unnoticed. I had a great time of it, honestly, much more than I can justify. We all have our fantasies as hormonal kids about all the things we'd do if we were invisible, right? I went through drawers and under sinks, swiped a few knick-knacks I'd always liked, and of course I watched countless showers and changes of clothing. And, when I lucked out, sex with new boyfriends, for that matter.

God, the heart attack I nearly had the first time I came back into one of my ex-girlfriends' flats with her, and found the new guy she was seeing sat on her couch waiting for her! I was so sure he was about to ask what the hell I was doing there, and either she'd just be freaked out and he'd kick my arse, or whatever was happening would wear off and they'd both have a go at me. But he didn't say anything, or look at me, and quickly it was clear that _he_ couldn't even see me either. I spent the evening watching them together and listening in, amused by what an idiot he seemed to be and just making all my critical comments about him out loud, because why keep them in my head? He wasn't bad-looking, though, I'd give her that. I almost didn't dare hope -- but sure enough, after they'd ordered dinner and snuggled up watching a film for long enough, she started sliding her hand up high on his thigh, the same way she'd used to do to me. He leaned back so she could open up his flies and start stroking his cock, and then lean down to suck it, and then both their clothes ended up on the floor and her just riding him on the couch, rising up on her knees and sinking on his lap in the glow of the screen. And all the while, I sat on the armchair right across the way and wanked off, with my eyes glued to every inch of their moving flesh.

For a while, it was just that sort of thing, and it was great for me. As long as they'd never know about it, I couldn't really see the harm for them, either. Just a bit of fun. I might as well believe that, since I definitely had no plans to stop anytime soon. But then...

I visited my exes pretty regularly for a few months, spending evenings in their places and watching. And I never really noticed, not consciously, when it began to stop being enjoyable. When it started not to be so nice anymore. All I remember is becoming aware of myself one evening, where I was sat at the end of the table watching Stephanie and her boyfriend eat dinner and laugh together, and suddenly realising that I wasn't having a good time doing what I was doing anymore at all. In fact, my stomach was in a tight, miserable knot inside me, and there was something like depression creeping up inside my chest. When was the last time I'd had that: sitting down for dinner with someone, someone who could actually see me, and laughing with them? When was the last time I'd _touched_ a girl, instead of watching them touch themselves or be touched by someone else?

This was getting out of hand, I decided, and I left Stephanie's flat early that night. I didn't have to give up my new hobby, but I should at least try to balance it with living my own life, at least a little. I'd never been a fan of all the more difficult parts of relationships, but they were what you needed to go through to get somebody to actually see you. Maybe that was worth it after all.

But when I started trying to date again... I found that things had changed, in my absence. I'd normally had no trouble pulling a girl when I went out to a pub of an evening, I'm not a bad-looking guy myself, but all of a sudden it just seemed like wherever I went, no one so much as looked my way. No matter what I did, every time I tried to start a conversation with someone, she always seemed to just look right through me.

And it took me much longer than it probably should have, given the circumstances, to think that maybe that was _literal_ , and to try the sorts of tests I had tried with my exes, when I'd gone to see them. Shouting in someone's face or grabbing their shoulder or something they would have been hard-pressed just to pretend not to see. And sure enough, the result was the same. It wasn't just my exes who couldn't see me now; it was the strangers at the pubs I frequented, too.

Worse yet, once I'd noticed it there, I could see how it was beginning to spread. First just ex-girlfriends, then strangers. Then my co-workers stopped responding to my emails, and when I spoke to them. The few friends I had stopped answering calls and invitations to go out (which I'd been making more and more of lately, in my increasing desperation). Then finally my parents no longer picked up the phone when I called them, and when I took the train out to Bath to see them in person, they wouldn't answer the door, even though I could see them inside through the window.

It's not immediate, it seems like. It doesn't happen right away when I first meet someone. People step around me on the street, and cashiers greet me when I come up to the till in a shop. I cling to those little bits of human contact now: the only ones I get. But the longer I spend in someone's presence -- the more they're able to get used to me -- it's like eventually I just slide out of their minds entirely. I've gone out to eat a time or two, alone of course, and had a server take my order when I come in but forget all about me by the time my food is ready, and never bring it out.

So now all I can seem to do is catch what I can, in the few moments I can, in public spaces where people have to be polite up front. And try not to wonder how long it'll be before nobody ever sees me, even for a second, at all.

At least I'll have plenty of time to watch, I suppose. But the more I think about it, the more that's also coming to sound like the same old boring chore, over and over again.

\------

Statement ends.

\------

When Jon looked up again, coming out of the semi-trance of reading a statement, he noticed that the two men on the other side of the desk were indeed right where they had been at the start. Now, however, they were looking at one another instead of at him. Elias's face still bore that same neutral-sinister smile he always seemed to wear, while Lukas's expression was the visual equivalent of a long-suffering sigh. "Is this what passes for a hint with you these days, Elias?" he asked.

"I don't know, Peter," answered Elias in the tone that butter would use if it were insufferable. "I suppose it's on you if you've been gone so long you've forgotten."

What happened next was hard for Jon to understand in the moment -- especially because he was still more than a little hung up on why Elias had chosen that statement in particular as a demonstration piece for one of the Institute's donors. Therefore, he wasn't paying perfect attention when Lukas began to move, and it was already happening before he could react. For such a large man, he was lightning-fast, out of his chair and in Elias's personal space before Jon had really registered the motion at all. 

Elias' smile remained fixed as Lukas grabbed him by the back of his neck, the way someone in an old cartoon might heft a stray cat. Jon had only a brief, startled moment to consider the possibility that this had indeed been _exactly_ the response Elias had been hoping for. Then Jon was jumping back in the chair, as Lukas shoved Elias face-down across his own desk with an impressive thud. Lukas's hands were as large as he was, knobby bear paws that channeled his strength. His grip on the back of Elias's neck held Elias solidly in place -- not that it seemed Elias meant to resist at all.

Jon was stunned into frozen stillness by what seemed like an assault happening right in front of him, unable to think or react. Let alone to process the implications of how Lukas gripped the waistband of Elias's trousers from behind and yanked them down with incredible force; Jon was certain he heard at least one seam ripping, to say nothing of a button clattering to the floor. And then Lukas raised that paw-like hand and brought it down hard on Elias's backside, making a sharp cracking noise.

Yet pinned as he was to the desk, in such a compromising position before his employee, Elias looked like nothing so much as the proverbial canary-eating cat. Even as he gasped at the spanking blow, Elias's smile remained on his parted lips, transcending the startling brutal treatment. "Strike a nerve?" Elias purred, glancing back over his shoulder at Lukas, who swatted his ass again with bruising force.

There were so very many things to try to cope with right now, but perhaps the most important to Jon at the moment was how much they were between him and the door. Elias's office was not large -- smaller than Jon's in fact, though Elias didn't have to share his with several storage shelves. His desk could be passed around to either side, of course, but not with the clearance that one would want for inching by a pair of grappling eldritch monsters. And there was absolutely no way for Jon to get to the room's only door without drawing some amount of attention to himself, which seemed at the moment like the _last_ thing he should be doing.

He was jerked wide-eyed again out of that train of thought, though, by Lukas undoing the front of his trousers one-handed, still keeping a powerful grip on Elias's neck with his other. Lukas's cock sprung out, erect and uncut and shockingly thick, even with Lukas's hand beside it for scale. Perhaps Jon himself had somehow managed to go hysterically invisible, making them both forget entirely that he was here, because otherwise, why on earth would they both be gearing up to have sex right here, right in front of him?

And perhaps the worst part of the whole mess was that Jon was hard. Not mildly, not incidentally, not the way he got when he just hadn't remembered to get himself off in a while. He was _achingly_ hard, so much that even his own loose-fitting trousers were feeling quite snug. Pushed back from the desk as he was, the bulge at his lap was obvious. Between the statement and the men in front of him, he'd been worked into quite a state. Propriety demanded he should hide such a thing, and he would, absolutely. Any minute now.

Lukas nodded toward Jon, and with a voice far more casually genial than the situation warranted, said, "Top drawer, on your left, there's a little box in there. If you'd be so kind?"

It was to Jon's dim horror that he realised he could think of no way to respond to that but to open the drawer. Inside there was indeed a carved wooden box, about the size of a cigar box. Jon got it out and placed it atop the desk within Lukas's easy reach, still with his expression frozen and trying to move as little as possible.

"Much obliged," Lukas said, flipping the top open. Inside, nestled among some objects Jon probably didn't want to think about, was a small bottle of lube. The knowledge that this might be a regular thing between them was something Jon wanted to think about even _less_ , if possible, so instead he watched as Lukas flipped open the cap and poured a generous amount of the clear liquid right onto the tip of his cock. He then wrapped his meaty fingers around it, slicking up his shaft all the way to the root.

When Lukas pushed his cock inside of Elias's ass, Elias almost _purred_ with delight. He looked far more self-satisfied than anyone with his face half-pushed against a hard surface should. Jon saw him use what little leverage he had in the position to lift his hips, encouraging Lukas to take him deep.

Then Elias looked at Jon. It took a small shift of Elias's shoulders, a little tilt of Elias's head, but suddenly he was staring straight at Jon with those piercing eyes of his. He seemed not even to blink as he fixed Jon with a near-tangible stare, pinning Jon back against Elias's own chair. That gaze remained even as Elias's lips parted in a series of low gasps, as Lukas built up a rhythm. Every time Lukas's hips slammed against Elias's ass, Elias moaned with it, leaving no question as to how much he must like to be fucked like that. With his nice suit askew and his hair mussed, he should have looked a wreck, debauched and debased, at the mercy of others. Instead, the look he fixed Jon with let Jon know just how much Elias was the only person in this room in any state of control.

Even if Jon had been able to muster himself to try an escape now, when he hadn't so far, that gaze would have held him fast. The feeling it stirred in him was an agony of discomfort, certainly, and fear, and even revulsion... but it was something else, as well. Something he was less equipped to identify, and had never felt anything like before. Like Elias's eyes on him were forcing some mirroring thing inside his own chest to iris open, burgeoning slowly into being, lidless and hollow and hungry in his unseen depths.

He watched them. He watched Lukas's hands grip Eliias's hips tight enough to dig into the flesh, Lukas's hips drive slapping up against Elias hard enough to rock him forward and back on the desk, Elias's fingers grip the lip of wood with such force they turned white. And at some point, without being fully aware of it but also without being unaware enough not to cringe from it, Jon's own hands fumbled down as if in a dream to the front of his trousers, and worked free his cock to stroke it.

At least neither of them really reacted to speak of: Lukas was plainly absorbed in his work, and Elias's gaze only continued to bore into Jon's face, hot and steady and imperious. It was humiliating enough how quickly Jon found himself speeding toward climax, his face burning and never quite enough air in his lungs. He had locked his free hand around the arm of Elias's chair, and it flexed and clung there as his thighs spread out a bit in spite of himself, and he panted and shuddered. His throat had just started to work to hold back the pathetic little whimper that wanted to emerge when Lukas glanced up at him, and smiled through his heavy breath. It might have been the sort of mild, polite smile for excusing oneself past in a cramped hallway, if not for the faint ruddiness that had come up in Lukas's pale skin and the absolute wreck of his person.

"Here you are," Lukas said, and in the same roughened breath he reached forward and grabbed a punishing handful of Elias's hair, adding to its disarray even as Lukas used the grip to shove Elias's head mercilessly down and forward. Lukas must have had Elias's feet entirely off the floor, by how his face wound up practically level with Jon's cock, bent sharply over the desk with his ass at the highest point. "Might as well give you a target to aim for."

Jon couldn't even begin to _think_ a response to that, let alone say one. His breath hitched hard into his chest, instead, and his hand tightened in a convulsive squeeze around his cock. And after only a few more seconds of stroking himself furiously, his motions going wilder and voice increasingly shaping his breaths, he did come -- with enough force that the spurt of it indeed spattered liberally over Elias's face, his lips and nose and cheek.

He collapsed back in Elias's chair, gasping, for a moment unable to be anything but a loose sprawl of himself. Elias's eyes had fluttered half-lidded, at least, and his breathing had become increasingly erratic; after probably only seconds more of Lukas pounding into him (and Elias's arm working in furious jerks under his own body, Jon noticed only dimly and couldn't even summon the strength to be discomfited by), he stiffened and then bowed his back in his uncomfortable-looking position, groaning out a long and rising sound as he also bucked and surely came. Lukas never so much as slowed, even after Elias had collapsed spent on the desk and was clearly shuddering with every merciless stroke, until he had burst into one last furor of thrusts and let out a long gasping exhale at their end. His eyes shut, and he froze still for a long moment at the deepest drive of his hips, before also falling forward in a heavy lean on the desktop.

Then it seemed very shockingly quiet in Elias's office, for what seemed like a very long time.

Finally, Elias began to stir himself, still catching his breath but also pawing up on his hands and attempting to climb back to his feet behind him. From what Jon could see, though, if Lukas wasn't deliberately making the process more difficult, he was certainly accomplishing it to an admirable degree accidentally. Eventually they did both straighten up and begin to pull themselves together, however, in a stagger of heavy breath. And that seemed at last to flip whatever switch in Jon's dazed brain let him jolt alert again, and begin hastily reordering his clothing.

"Well," Elias said into the silence, with calm precise dignity for all his still-laboured breath. He'd produced an embroidered handkerchief from his pocket at some unthinkable point, and wiped his hands and face (good God) on it, before doing up his flies as casually as though he were fucked within an inch of his life in front of one of his employees every day. "Thank you very much for your assistance, Jon. I've always felt that donor relations should be as mutually beneficial as possible, and it's always helpful to demonstrate some hands-on aspects of the work."

Lukas snorted from behind Elias's shoulder, not quietly, as he was sorting out his own clothing. "If it's for our mutual benefit, than why do I always seem to be doing all the work?"

Elias glanced back at him, and then leaned back with a very broad smirk, just slightly into Lukas's space. "It takes strong communication to be able to delegate," he said, with unmissably pointed sweetness. The look of unamusement Lukas gave him could likewise have curdled milk.

They remained like that for a moment, as though it were a challenge neither would quite back down from. Then Elias's eyes turned back toward Jon, almost without his moving his head at all.

"That will be all," Elias said, with a slight renewed smile. "I wouldn't want to keep you."

And then whatever spell it was had broken, and Jon managed to stagger up to his feet and finally squeeze past them as fast as he possibly could, without another word. It was impossible to keep from swallowing, as both of their eyes followed him, as he slipped back out into the hall. And once he was there, and out of their sight, it was everything he could do not to run.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Statement CWs:  
> -nonconsensual voyeurism and generally kinda gross behavior
> 
> Post-statement CWs:  
> -rough sex  
> -involving an observer with dubious consent


	11. The Scent

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Everyone who comments on this continues to give us life and power
> 
> See notes at the end for content warnings for this chapter.

Basira tended to pop up in odd places lately, so Jon supposed he should have been used to it. She'd never had a desk of her own before... everything, and though now Martin's and Tim's in the main assistant workspace were both abandoned (making Jon's stomach knot painfully tight inside him every time he had to walk past), she didn't seem to want to take either of them over. Not that Jon could have said he didn't understand that. Instead, she just sort of migrated about, when she was in the Archives at all: sitting and investigating old files on the sleeping bag she'd set up in a tucked-away corner, or pulling up a chair to sit at Melanie's desk with her so they could talk, or trailing after Daisy as she walked back and forth restlessly through the halls, trying to strengthen her legs again (and trying to occupy her mind, as well).

Still, when Jon came back to his own office with an armload of statements that had been hidden away elsewhere, and found Basira sitting there on the extra chair he nominally kept for visitors, it did manage to give him a bit of a start.

"Sorry, do you mind?" she said instead of calling attention to it, though, looking up at him even and unsmiling as always now. "Melanie's been wandering 'round in a bit of a mood today, and I just wanted somewhere I could concentrate." She held up the book she'd apparently been reading, though Jon could hardly imagine what was still around that she hadn't read _and_ could possibly be of use.

"I... don't know if this is going to be the best place for that," he said, breaking past his hesitation to finish coming in and setting the files down. He shot her a sheepish little smile as he did, which she also didn't return. "I was actually going to record a statement."

"Oh, that's fine," Basira said, shrugging. She'd already picked her book back up and turned her gaze back to it. "I can tune those out. Go ahead."

No small amount of things about that gave Jon more considerable pause -- but in the end, he just let out a slight breath and nodded, and said nothing more. He'd just have to take her word for it. ...And it _was_ nice just not to be alone, to have someone else in the room for a while. Even if it was someone who didn't care for him very much at present.

He settled down at his desk, and sorted through the pile. One he hadn't seen before caught his eye in particular, and he picked it up and began to read.

\------

Statement of Luke Underwood, regarding a private excursion on which he was invited:

Under ordinary circumstances, I think most of my friends and confidantes would describe me as, perhaps literally, the single most boring homosexual they've ever encountered. It's not that I don't enjoy having a bit of fun, or a drink, or sex for that matter, but I was simply brought up by extremely white suburban parents to enjoy every indulgence in life very much in moderation, and with all possible discretion. Despite the best efforts of many, I've never managed to shake off the habit. I work in an inconsequential and undemanding office job, I've had a modest number of monogamous and closed relationships with highly reliable men who wore wristwatches, I go to bed by ten o'clock, I limit myself to two drinks per occasion, and I don't believe I've ever in my adult life owned a shirt that was a colour. I don't even much mind that even the people who like me think I'm dull as old dishwater; I've certainly been able to develop a sense of humour about it. But I tell you this only so you can understand how the first unusual occurrence was that I ever considered Brice Thorpe-Pressley's invitation to begin with.

One afternoon, my friend Monette texted me a link to a recent posting on an online messageboard for classified advertisements -- I can only assume as a joke. I followed the link, and saw that the message was an open invitation for applications for a private event to be held the following month. The wording was cagey about the details, promising only an "adults-only retreat for men-loving men" in a "stunning unspoilt wilderness" that would "reveal new depths of passion and disinhibition." I actually thought it was for some sort of New Age self-help excursion or something at first, before I started to read between the lines and notice how often it said things like "sensual" and "discreet" and "intimate." The longer I looked at it, the more I began to realise it was really advertising for some kind of extended outdoor gay sex party, a sort of Fire Island in the woods. Whoever was in charge was being rather selective, as well, from what I could tell: applying required multiple photographs, exhaustive recent medical testing, and personal references, to name a few.

Obviously none of that was remotely to my taste, and I was ready to close out of the page and forget the whole thing. But before I could, I found myself pausing, and thinking: wouldn't it really be one in Monette's eye if I actually did go through and apply for it? It would be the last thing she would ever expect from me. At the very least, we'd have a good laugh about it the next time we went for drinks. In a mischievous sort of way, it was tempting, and I was single at the moment, so no one would be upset with me for considering it. What could be the harm in just sending in an application? The ad did say "serious applicants only," but surely it couldn't be legally binding or anything.

And I don't know if it's just the colouring of hindsight or not, but now that I think of it, I think there was something else to it, too. Something just below the level of my conscious mind that tempted me over the edge, and into clicking through and saving the application form. I feel like there was... a kind of anticipation in it, at the edges of my mind, egging me on. Just reading the ad seemed to have gotten my blood up a bit faster, made an electricity run under my skin. Like I'd caught a scent on the air, and I felt I had to chase it down.

So, amid some hemming and hawing back and forth with myself over how ridiculous the whole thing was, I wound up gathering all the required application materials, and sending them in. And _then_ I really did forget about it, and go on about my business as usual, for the next couple of weeks.

Until, that was, I received an exceedingly tasteful, high-quality, and expensive-looking invitation in the mail. It was hand-calligraphed, and completely plain except for my name and address on the envelope, and the text on the back of the card inside. This provided the information that my application had been accepted, and I was invited to participate in the upcoming event on the private estate of one Mr. Brice Thorpe-Pressley. And a few lines of accompanying details: date and time, where to be when, and that I should not disclose the location I had been given, but should pack a change of clothing and a few basic supplies.

Well, what was I to do? Now I was on the hook for the thing, and there was quite pointedly no way to decline, or contact information at all. Just a rendezvous point at which to present myself, and one which was already quite out of the way, far too much so to go there only to tender my regrets. Either I would be a no-show -- which the invitation strongly discouraged in ominous terms -- or I would just have to go through with it.

In the end, bizarre though it seemed even to me, I chose the latter. I had simply put so much effort into the whole absurdity already that the siren song of sunk-cost fallacy drew me along... and perhaps that strange, semi-conscious sense of excitement did, as well.

The estate was located in northern Wales: in the rough vicinity of Snowdonia, from what I've been able to gather. On the appointed day, I took a train to Liverpool, and proceeded to the rendezvous point that had been specified in the city. There I joined up with a group of other men looking variously shifty, nervous, and excited, and we were all met by Mr. Thorpe-Pressley's drivers and a miniature fleet of luxury passenger vans, to be ferried the last distance to our destination. For all its awkwardness, this stage of the journey was actually quite enjoyable; we drove through increasingly lovely countryside as we made our way south-west, one rolling wooded hill and picturesque farmyard after another.

We arrived in early evening to the grounds: a large swath of hilly private woodland secluded at some distance from the nearest villages, with a perimeter of high fencing and stern NO TRESPASSING signs that our vans passed inside of through a large wrought-iron gate. To this day I have no idea exactly how much land the estate covers, and don't much care to find out. Suffice it to say, I consider myself quite comfortable economically speaking, but if it hadn't been before it would have been immediately clear that this Mr. Thorpe-Pressley was wealthy to a degree I most likely couldn't even imagine. The vans brought us over a few hills along the main drive, and then veered off onto a smaller dirt track that led deeper into the woods, until at last we arrived at a clearing in the trees with what appeared to be a sort of picnic site set up. After a light meal -- during which at least a few of us began in spite of the strange circumstances to attempt a few jokes and friendly overtures -- we were at last finally graced by our host's presence, and received an explanation as to what exactly we were here for.

Mr. Thorpe-Pressley was a curiously unassuming man, small and slim and dressed surprisingly casually for the occasion, although possessed of a truly alarming mustache. He beamed across us like a master of ceremonies as he explained that the evening's entertainment would be a "fox hunt." More specifically, one of our number would be selected as the "fox," and he would be given a set span of time in which to flee; then the others, serving as the "hounds," would give chase. And when the fox was finally caught, well... the hounds would do with him whatever they saw fit, our host said, with a truly obscenely exaggerated wink. The grounds were all contained, and the fox and his hunters could make as much use of their space as they liked in the process, but that was all there was to it. It seemed simple enough -- perhaps even a bit dully so, even to me.

Neither was I taken by surprise when we were all encouraged to strip out of all of our clothing, to be left in the care of the small and stony-faced entourage of staff Mr. Thorpe-Pressley had brought along in his entrance. It was a bit awkward, of course, all of us standing around starkers in the same clearing where we'd just been eating sandwiches together, but I suppose some people get more of a thrill from that sort of thing than I do. I definitely saw that more than a few cocks around the group had stiffened considerably even before everyone was fully ready.

Then came the drawing to determine the first fox -- and, much to my considerable surprise and mild consternation, my lot was the one that came up. There was an absurd little scuffle of applause, and then I was escorted up to confirm with Mr. Thorpe-Pressley personally, and with both of us now naked, of course. I was a bit surprised at first to see the scars on his chest and the decidedly strapped-on silicone nature of his own stiffy, but as unexpected elements of this situation went, it was absolutely bottom of the list, wasn't it? He was all business, just checking to ensure that I understood what was expected of me and was ready... but there was something about his eyes that was curious, all the same. Some light in them that I didn't recognise and didn't understand, and tried to pretend to myself at once that I hadn't seen.

Still, here I was, I told myself, and the least I could do was be a good sport. I was set up for my head-start, and at the blowing of an actual hunting-horn, if you can imagine, I ran off dutifully into the trees. I've been a casual cross-country runner since school, and I'm still in quite good shape -- the application requirements had been clear about the need for physical fitness, I recalled only belatedly, but I suppose I'd assumed the reasoning was much shallower and more discriminatory -- so running through the woods for a while was hardly a daunting proposition for me. Doing so without shoes was slightly more concerning, especially as the sun had nearly set by this point, but I simply resolved to be very careful of my footing as I darted through underbrush, and across little wandering streams.

It was some twenty minutes later when I heard the horn again, now distant through the trees behind me -- at least from what I'd been told, as I had no way of checking. It was full dark by then, especially under the trees, and the sound of my own breath seemed very loud and close. And though I still knew, in my mind, that it was only a silly lascivious game, still the sonorous note signaling my pursuit seemed to pierce all through my chest with sudden adrenaline -- even fear. My heart thudded with it, and even in such darkness that I could scarcely see where I was going, I ran faster.

I don't know how long it was later that I began to hear bodies crashing through the underbrush, a cacophony of breath and running feet catching up to me. I'd long since lost all sense of time or direction, nothing seeming left in my head but the mindless need to run away through the night. Quite possibly I had started to curve around without knowing it, and they were able to intercept me easily. In any case, my pulse jumped, and I put on a burst of speed -- but of course that meant throwing aside my caution, and I stumbled over a gnarl of branches from a fallen log. I was lucky not to hurt myself in any significant way, but I went sprawling to the earth, the breath knocked a bit out of me. It wasn't a quiet fall, and with me knocked flat for the moment and unable to move, it took only seconds for them to be on me.

No one, I can promise you, is more keenly aware than I am that being run down by a pack of naked, aroused gay Englishmen should not be a remotely frightening prospect. And yet... I don't have any explanation for what I saw. I can't say to you with absolute certainty that it was even real. I saw it as clearly as I see the pen and paper in front of me now, but it was just so _strange_ in those woods, on that run, beyond what I can possibly have words for. Everything distorted, every smell seemed too strong, every sound too loud. So it could have been all in my mind, I will allow that. I just absolutely don't believe it was.

They had changed. All of my pursuers, to a man, now hardly looked human at all. Where there should have been tall muscled bodies made pale by moonlight, there were now stooped, shaggy, hulking things, their shoulders low and heads too large. Their arms hung down too long and low, and their hands had lengthened into gangling monstrosities, wickedly sharp claws taking up much of each finger. The changes to their faces were nearly indescribable: all I can really think to say is that they had _lengthened_ , at the front, to a dizzying degree. And all of that length appeared to be occupied by new and vicious teeth.

It seemed also that they ran at me far too quickly -- giving doubt to my idea that they had cut me off after all. I thought I even heard a few of them further back in the pack baying as they approached -- weird warbling howls that split through the night and raised every atavistic hair up on my spine.

I had no time to find my feet again, no time to run. They surrounded me, fell on me, and seized me.

Huge, coarse, hairy hands grappled over my chest, my arms, my thighs, and between them. More pawed roughly at my face, pushed sharp claws inside my mouth. I could barely get the breath to gasp at all the greedy groping of my balls and cock -- stiffening very quickly again after having been shrunken with fear, all in spite of myself -- and the further hands that swarmed in to pull up my thighs and spread them, knead my arse under them. A half-dozen hard and leaking pricks, which the transformation _also_ seemed to have made terrifyingly large, were already being rubbed all over various parts of me. I could see nothing but a swirl of moving shadows and glinting eyes and teeth, my hearing full of snarling and growling and the terrified, aroused panting of my own breath.

They all hefted me fully off the ground between them, holding me suspended by my limbs and back between their bodies, and crowded in closer than ever. Claws raked at me, sharp teeth pricked at the side of my neck and high on the inside of my thigh, but I was already too far gone to do anything but moan and get harder, even though I was quite sure they were drawing a bit of blood. I sucked the fingers in my mouth, and then the cock that was shoved in it instead, and then did the best I could with the second cock that joined it at the same time, and the third. What felt like endless hands and rough tongues were lapping and fondling and squeezing and jerking my cock all at once, more swatting and scratching and licking into my arse, and semen starting to spatter across me in a place or two as low roars sounded above me and the rutting into my sides and chest and arse intensified.

I couldn't bear much more of it myself. I screamed as best I could with my mouth stuffed full, with terror and overwhelmed sensation both, all tangled together into each other. And I writhed the little amount I could in all of that hungry grip, and came explosively, almost wailing through it as all those greedy mouths dove to get a taste of the mess.

When I was completely spent, I sagged into my captors' arms, and I was let down with surprising calm and care -- although almost with an edge of what felt like disappointment spreading through the crowd around me, that the chase was done. My legs felt like jelly, when they tried to set me back on them, and I had to be supported for a moment before I could firm myself up again. The fear was trying to sink back into me, as I breathed the wild woodland air, but -- 

Something was happening to me. My body was shuddering around me, stretching itself, _changing_ itself. Even as I could only lean on the horrible things that had once been men around me, groaning with pain, my spine changed shape, and my head throbbed and bulged hideously out in front of me, and sudden sharpness slotted itself into my mouth and burst out of my hands. My skin prickled with the feeling of new rough hair pushing out of it. It _hurt_ , desperately, what was happening to me... but it felt _good_ , too. I understood immediately what it was, down at the bottom of the horror and pain: I was becoming like the rest of them. I was beginning to belong.

And even as I was transforming, in the moonlight I could see that another man in our midst was changing, as well. Except instead of growing and twisting, he was shrinking, shuddering and arching as his body was put right and vulnerable and human again.

At last, both our changes were complete, and at once I felt my blood beginning to race again. Because, you see, we had a new fox.

The man stared at himself, shaking, then stared around at us. We towered over him, hairy and hungry, snapping teeth and flashing claws. His eyes were huge, his mouth trembling in terror. He began to back away, and then he ran.

And in spite of the keenness of our hunger, we gave him his head-start. What fun would it be without?

But finally we chased him down, we hounds, of course. His legs weren't nearly so long as ours anymore, or as quick. When we caught him, the foremost of the pack threw him to the ground, and the rest of us threw ourselves in after, burying him in a heap of growling, snapping, clawing flesh. We pawed and tasted him until we'd all had our fill. And then when it was done, he was one of us again, and another one ran.

I barely remember any of this, I feel like I should be clear, and none of it in any detail. Just vague, dark shapes of the ideas and sensations, blurred almost to nothing by adrenaline and the bestial shape of all my thoughts. I have no explanation for it, and scarcely even words for most of it, but I have no doubt of what happened, either. The whole night we raced after one fox after another, running them down and then fucking them to a furious peak. I don't know how many claw-marks and bite-marks I left in flesh, or how many times I came howling. Or whatever I had become did.

Eventually, my memory fades away into darkness. The next thing I remember is being woken by the light of the fully risen sun, and finding myself somewhere in the middle of a heap of piled naked bodies on the forest floor, covered in cuts and bruises and with every inch of myself in an agony of aches and pains and exhaustion. Every part of me that wasn't buried in flesh was also very cold, and slick with the dew.

The others were waking up around me, as well, stirring and groaning and blinking around themselves with as much goggle-eyed confusion as I felt. They looked at least as much the worse for wear as I was, and some more so. Almost all of us were smeared very liberally with blood, as well. And I thought, though I cannot be certain of it, that there were fewer of us there than had started out.

Somewhere near the center of the pile, Brice Thorpe-Pressley sat up at last then, yawning, and stretched his arms. He had a wicked set of cuts across his face from which there was gore all through his mustache and down his chest, but he looked as peaceful and pleased with himself as if he had just woken after a far more ordinary night of debauchery. Looking around him to survey us all, he only sat quiet and thoughtful for a moment.

Then he broke into a broad and knowing smile. And as his serving-staff began to pull up in golf carts along a trail at the top of the nearest rise, with armloads of blankets and steaming carafes in hand, he told us he wished us a good journey home, and that we should all consider ourselves invited to return for his next soiree.

I suppose I don't need to say that I don't know what to make of any of this, apart from being simply glad that I made it home alive. After we'd cleaned up and dressed, the drivers took us back to the train station as though nothing had happened, and we all went our separate ways, unwilling to look one another in the eyes. I went back to my flat and my job, and resumed being as boring as possible with all the haste I could muster.

But that night has also never fully left my mind, even as I've gone back to my ordinary life in the city. And there have also been more than a few occasions now -- waiting at a tube stop late at night with few others around, or walking down a particularly deserted side street -- when I've felt the hair at the back of my neck begin to crawl up again, in that same way. As though I might have heard, without being entirely aware of it, the slap of a broad and hairy foot following me, or the snuffle of heavy, monstrous breath at my back.

Which I don't think would bother me quite so much, if the idea of it were only a little less appealing.

\------

Statement ends.

\------

There were plenty of things to try to deal with, after blinking himself up after that statement's aftermath. Jon was able to address none of them, however, before Daisy's voice from the doorway interrupted: "What were you doing?"

Both Jon and Basira turned to look at her -- and there was no time to ask how Basira had done with tuning _that_ one out, either. Daisy was staring at him with an intensity that still made his stomach tighten by reflex, and everything about her posture in the doorway raised alarms: straining forward and thrumming-tense, as though she would next go up on the balls of her feet, or even to all fours. She was breathing in deep pulls, a little too quickly.

"Daisy?" Basira said, and Jon was relieved that she, at least, was able to find her voice. She didn't move to get up, but she shut her book without looking at it, and she was watching Daisy almost as intently as Daisy was Jon. "You all right?"

"Fine," Daisy said, without looking around. After a brief pause, she took a deeper breath, and her eyes fluttered -- trying to take hold of herself, maybe, though if so it didn't seem entirely successful. "It just. Feels good in here."

"I was just, ah," Jon began, his voice much hoarser and fainter than he might have liked, "reading a statement," but Daisy was coming into the room in a slow stalking circle that reeled her inexorably in to him, and then she was standing over him.

And then she was leaning in over him, planting her hands quick on his chair's armrests on either side of him, making Jon twitch helplessly where he sat. She was very close as she breathed in deeper still through her nose, and this all might have been quite a bit more manageable if any of it were helping to make Jon _less_ uncomfortably hard.

"Daisy?" he said himself now, quieter. She didn't move away, but she did still, slightly. "You don't have to do anything. Remember. You can control this."

Daisy stayed still a moment -- and then something passed through her, like a shiver. Her breath unsteadied, and then she pushed back just a little, so she could look in Jon's eyes at least sidelong. There was a small curve to her mouth, and while there wasn't enough of _her_ back in her eyes to let Jon completely relax, there was definitely more. Enough that he could breathe a little better.

"Yeah," she said,on a sighing exhale, and then her smile spread a bit. "Might... need some help, though."

Jon opened his mouth, encouraged, to say that of course, he would do anything he could -- and then he was jolted out of it by the sound of his office door quietly shutting. When he jerked his head around to look at it, past Daisy where she leaned so deeply into his space, he saw Basira standing there, in front of the door she had closed. While he was looking, she leaned back against it, and folded her arms.

"Basira," Daisy said, though when Jon glanced back he saw that she had never looked away. She took a deep breath, let it out shuddering. "...Don't let me hurt him."

"You're not gonna hurt him," Basira said, calmly, from her position by the door. Jon thought her tone might have softened fractionally too, though, perhaps in spite of herself. "You're gonna be really nice to him, actually." She paused just long enough for Jon to have no idea how to interpret that at all, and then said: "Get your clothes off."

Daisy stripped with sharp, almost military efficiency. She was barefoot already, so it was short work to remove the rest. She tugged her shirt up over her head, breaking eye contact with Jon for the first time since she'd walked in as she pulled it over her head. Her shapeless grey bra came off a second later, peeled off in the same way. Pants and underwear were even more easily discarded: She hooked her thumbs in the elastic waistbands of both, shimmying them down her hips. There was no slowness to the movement, no pretty titillation of a striptease. Daisy was not doing this for him.

The two of them made quite a pair together: Basira in the background, almost every inch of her round body clothed, arms crossed her chest, unwaveringly calm; Daisy much closer, her lean body pale and bared, looking ready to pounce. Jon was fully aware he was focusing on the aesthetics of the situation to distract himself from the conflicting sensations of terror and arousal, especially as Daisy moved forward, almost scenting the air.

"Good, that's good," Basira said. "See to his trousers, then. And gentle. Don't rip anything."

Jon had a moment's panic about just how fleshy was the thing Basira was instructing Daisy not to harm. But no, she'd just meant his clothes, or so it seemed, as Daisy leaned over him and began to unbutton his fly. As soon as it was freed, his prick popped forth with a jack-in-the-box suddenness that might have been comic, under other circumstances.

From behind her, Basira made an approving noise. "That's nice," she half-purred, leaving Jon to wonder if this was the strangest compliment he'd ever received on such an intimate part. "Doesn't that look nice, Daisy?"

"Nice," Daisy repeated, though there was almost more echo than sense to it, as though from something that had learned to mimic speech rather than to produce it. Daisy was still Daisy, but at the same time, there was something curled around her spine that was a different kind of Daisy. Jon supposed he understood better than most how that felt, living in the middle of that tension, negotiating with the monster you were becoming. He'd told himself there was no shame in giving in just a bit, from time to time, so the whole of it didn't burst and overwhelm you -- but that was a thing much easier said about yourself, and a thornier proposition when someone else's instinct had you locked in its sights.

Daisy ran her fingertips teasingly up the side of Jon's cock, making Jon moan in a whimpering way he couldn't bite back. The sound seemed to please her, widening her grin in a way that for a moment seemed to split her face. Jon wanted to tell her to _please_ be careful with whatever it was she intended, but some hindbrain instinct told him he was _mad_ if he spoke up and drew any more attention to himself. _As though you could possibly get her attention any more!_ his more rational brain noted, but this was no longer about rationality. It hadn't been from the moment Daisy had caught his scent.

"How do you feel?" asked Basira, her voice somehow even calmer than before. She wasn't asking the question because she wanted to know the answer; she was asking because she wanted Daisy to think it enough to say it.

Swallowing hard, Daisy gripped the armrests of Jon's chair, probably hard enough to leave fingernail marks in the material. "Hungry," Daisy said at last, the word a heavy exhale. "Wet."

The way she said those words made Jon moan again. He'd been hard earlier, certainly, but now he was _achingly_ so. Whatever had resonated with her to make her feel like this, it was now resonating back through him. He had the first clear conscious thought that he wanted to be inside her, and meeting her eyes, he knew that she wanted it too.

He tried to remind himself that this was Daisy. Daisy who'd terrified him and scarred him, yet who'd been so kind to him since she'd come back out of the Buried. She'd teased him and laughed with him in the way that he, an only child, had imagined big sisters might do. This wasn't someone he'd had a _spot_ of romantic inclinations toward in his life -- nor she toward him, he was all but concretely certain. This was _Daisy_.

Except, no it wasn't. Here in this room, the three of them together were fox and hound and hunter. And the hunt was on.

"Get onto his lap," Basira said, directing the proceedings from her vantage point, atop her proverbial high horse. "You don't want to hurt him. You want to ride him."

From the way Daisy moved, it seemed clear that, yes, that was indeed what she wanted. She put her knees on either side of Jon's hips on the wide chair. She was about the same size as he, so when she knelt astride his lap, her small, firm breasts were just at his eye level. With a low growl, she shifted her hips forward toward his, until he could feel the wetness of her slit begin to brush over the head of his prick. No amount of biting his lips together could have kept him from moaning about just how good that contact felt.

"There you are. You're being so good." Slowly, Basira moved closer, until Daisy's body no longer eclipsed her and Jon's line of sight. "You want to feel him, don't you?"

Daisy nodded, her breath ragged. "Let me run," she pleaded in a near-desperate whine.

But to Jon's surprise, Basira shook her head. "No. You're going to keep control the whole time." Her tone left no place for argument. "You're going to be nice. And that means you're going to fuck him nice."

Eyes clenched shut, Daisy nodded. She took several deep, slow breaths, arching her back for each inhale, then straightening her spine as she let the air escape. When she finally opened her eyes again, she seemed a little calmer, a little less likely to snap her lead. She reached down to where their hips met and wrapped her fingers around his cock, then slowly began to lower her body on to him.

The first push of his prick inside of her was almost shocking in its heat and tightness. Daisy had to stop after barely an inch, gripping the chair as she tried to catch her breath. Jon needed to do the same, faced with the uncommon-to-him problem of trying _not_ to get off. While the hunger inside him loved the rawness of the connection, the ever-quieter rational part of his brain made a feeble objection: Not that Jon had a great deal of experience with such things, but shouldn't there be some kind of prophylactic happening?

But no, Basira was being the rational one at the moment, as much as any of them could be, and she hadn't so much as paused for such considerations. Perhaps she knew better what Daisy needed, what would and would not satiate her like this. Or perhaps she just understood that such concerns belonged to futures far longer than any of them had.

Inch by inch, Daisy sank down, until his prick was buried to the root inside her cunt. _What now?_ thought Jon, vaguely worried that somehow the responsibility for directing the scenario had just passed to him. He sat there, frozen, as though caught in a trap that hadn't snapped shut its jaws just yet. That snap would just be a formality, though; there was no question he'd been caught.

"Good girl," Basira said after a long, heavy moment. "Do you like how he feels?"

Daisy nodded, grinding her hips against Jon's and groaning as he shifted inside her. Her thick nipples were hard and prominent, right in Jon's face, but he didn't dare move to touch them.

Basira nodded. "You're in control. Let it feel good."

With a deep growl that started low in her chest, Daisy began to move. She held on to the chair as she braced herself with her knees on either side of Jon's thighs, meaning that the only part of their bodies actually making skin-to-skin contact was where he penetrated her. The chair creaked beneath them as she fucked herself on him, registering just how much force she used every time she bounced up and down on his prick.

Jon could not remember having been more turned on in his life. There was a strange sort of freedom in barely being here at all, as though he might have excused himself from the scene, leaving behind only his penis, without changing much of anything. He was not in control, and therefore he could not screw anything up, not as long as _she_ was taking what _she_ needed. The sheer freedom of it meant that he could just give in and focus on how good it felt.

And the sensation of Daisy's body on his was indeed good. He wanted every inch of how she felt inside, warm and wet and tight. Panting, he gripped at the armrests himself, holding on as Daisy took him slow, fast, deep, shallow -- however she wanted.

"Fuck him," Basira said -- or did she even say it? Did they all just _know_ how the dance went now? "Good girl. Don't play with him. Take him. Eat him. Swallow him whole."

Daisy leaned her head back and cried out as she pumped her hips eagerly up and down. Her thighs started shaking as her pussy muscles begin to clench around his shaft. His relief was almost as great as hers -- he hadn't been a disappointment; he'd been good enough to get her off. He'd lasted as long as she'd needed, and now he, almost as an afterthought, could be allowed an indulgence of his own.

Jon didn't bother trying to silence himself, not now. He came hard, thrusting his hips up as far as their leverage would allow him. It felt like such a release, a near escape of sorts. Perhaps even a trap being sprung.

He came to soft awareness that one of Daisy's hands had come to rest on the back of his head, threading through his hair. They were there, holding on to one another, both panting like they'd just finished running a race. Neither one moved, or even seemed to know how to.

But Basira, as always, had it under control. She shrugged off her long cardigan, then placed it over Daisy's shoulders as she eased Daisy back. "Come on, love," Basira murmured into Daisy's hair. "Let's get you cleaned up."

Daisy nodded meekly. She winced as Jon's softening prick slipped out of her, then staggered a little as she shifted her weight back onto her feet. She looked peaceful now, almost dreamy. She gave no resistance as Basira guided Daisy's arms through the sleeves of the cardigan. The garment was already loose-fitting on Basira, and it swam on Daisy, wrapping almost double around her middle.

Basira ruffled her hair a little, a strangely playful gesture given what she'd just coached Daisy through. "You feel better?" she asked. Daisy nodded again. "Good. You all right, then?"

It took Jon a moment to realize that Basira was addressing him. _Was_ he all right? He had no metric by which to answer that question. He wasn't bleeding, and he'd gotten off good and hard, so he supposed that meant he was. "Think so, yeah," he said, surprised to find how small and scratchy his own voice seemed.

Basira gave him a sharp, appraising nod -- and there was in it, Jon could tell, a touch of gratitude. She didn't think much of Jon, and Jon could hardly blame her for that. But she knew that Jon was kind to Daisy, and when it came to Basira, that seemed almost more important than how someone treated her in the first place.

Then Jon might as well have evaporated, because Basira was back with her attention fully on Daisy. Keeping one arm on Daisy's back, she reached down to scoop up Daisy's discarded clothes, then guided her toward the door to the room. Daisy let herself be guided along the whole way, leaning into Basira's touch.

Alone in his office again, Jon exhaled hard and started about the business of putting himself back into a less scandalous state. His head was still swimming. If he hadn't currently been reaching for tissues to wipe himself clean before doing up his trousers again, he almost would've believed that he'd dreamed it all.

Not for the first time -- though for rather a different reason than ever before -- he found himself mourning his basement office's lack of a window. It would have been nice to get some fresh air in here, especially before whenever Melanie might find her way back again. There was, he had to admit, more than a bit of a scent on the air.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Statement CWs:  
> -sex party/group sex scenario with horror elements  
> -some implications of ableism around the selection process for said sex party
> 
> Post-statement CWs:  
> -some fear-entity-influenced sex where consent may be a little questionable for that reason  
> -sex with a non-participant observer, though much more voluntarily this time
> 
> Also just a quick edit to note this will not be the only trans character! It just hasn't worked out that way thus far! Very specifically, though, we were like "Well I don't want to have the only trans character be the evil guy!" "Well we're gonna need more trans characters." "PERFECT"


	12. On the Vine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Honestly can't believe how close we're getting to the end, y'all. Probably going to do the last two chapters as another double next week, so this really is nearly it!
> 
> See notes at the end for content warnings for this chapter.

The others had all left already, one by one: first Melanie, then Basira, then finally Daisy. Each had cited excuses, of course, about making phone calls or getting to bed early or whatever else, but Jon could see the restless shifting of their eyes and tension in their shoulders, the longer they were outside the relative safety of the Institute. It didn't take supernatural means to know better.

He supposed he should have a care for his own vulnerability, as well; but it was perhaps less than theirs by now, and he found himself reluctant to leave the comforting anonymity of a crowded bar. Paradoxically, the more people were crushed into a little place like this, the more invisible he could be, sitting alone in the secluded little booth they'd arrived early enough to secure. He could listen to snatches of very ordinary conversation, watch very human people having very normal evenings, and take some pleasure in the knowledge that if one of them did happen to glance his way, they'd see nothing but someone as human as themselves. It was a nice reprieve, even if it was just as isolating in its own way. He wondered if Martin--

No. He wasn't thinking about Martin tonight.

Jon took a breath, and let his eyes wander over the crowd again: couples drinking at the bar, groups of friends pressed up against little sections of wall they'd staked out. He was even able to believe that he was doing it innocently, for some time. Until he caught himself lingering, looking intently at a woman sitting alone at the far end of the bar and staring into her drink, to the point that he was _looking_. Digging, just below the level of consciousness, to see if there was something to find -- in her or in someone nearby.

Breath hissed in through Jon's teeth at the realisation, and he jolted in his seat, shaking himself hard as though he'd been falling asleep. "No," he muttered to himself, "no, no, no," and started pawing with slightly shaky hands at the bag leaning beside his chair -- in which he'd packed a couple of statements for the journey out, just in case. It had felt like an absurdly overcautious thing to do at the time, but now--

He felt a little better just by the time he'd taken one out, and the tape recorder that was there waiting even though he was quite certain he hadn't packed it. It was before he'd even finished setting them out on the table, though, that he realised that someone was walking toward the booth -- and then, as he arrived, just sitting down in the seat across from Jon's.

Jon jerked his head up, startled, and found that the person who'd joined him was a tall and very handsome Black man, who smiled at him in spite of a deep tiredness at the edges of his eyes. The man had a drink in either hand, one of which appeared to be a glass of the same halfway decent pale ale Jon had been drinking previously, and even as Jon stared at him in baffled silence, he reached forward to set that one down in front of Jon.

"Hi, Jon," he said, pleasantly and easily. "Sorry, I know it's rude to barge in on you like this, but I thought maybe I could make up for it if I bought you a drink. I was just glad to see you up and around, and I wanted to say hello."

It was hard to say whether it was that last, the sound of the man's voice (although by all rights that should have meant nothing to him), the buzz of foreign awareness at the bottom of his mind, or some combination of the three that made understanding finally fall into place. Jon exhaled with it, though, sitting back a bit in the booth. "Oliver," he said, not a question, and Oliver Banks's smile broadened a bit when he did. "I'd heard you were at the hospital, but... well. It's nice to actually see you, at last."

"Well, that's flattering," Oliver said, still smiling, and took a sip of his own drink before setting it down -- something dark in an old fashioned glass. "Thanks."

That managed to throw Jon slightly off his footing again, and he took a moment's pause to collect his thoughts before speaking again. "I suppose I should be the one thanking you."

Oliver tilted his head. His smile might have finally faded slightly. "Do you think so?"

Jon found he had no immediate response for that, either.

When his silence had grown awkward, though, Oliver only nodded at the statement in front of Jon -- which jolted him again a bit, at the realisation of how he'd forgotten it. "First things first, anyway. I didn't mean to interrupt you. Please, go ahead." At Jon's look, he smiled again. "I always like a good story. And it feels like you've got one there that I'd be especially interested in."

"I honestly don't know," Jon admitted, for lack of anything better to say. "I just grabbed a few at random, I don't even know what this one is about."

"We'll find out together, then." Oliver took another sip of his drink, his eyes lingering on Jon. "Whenever you like."

\------

Statement of Bright Asante, regarding a haunting:

I said when I came in that I'm here because I've been seeing a ghost, but truthfully, that isn't exactly right. The person I've seen is dead -- he's been dead for almost a year now -- but when I see him he isn't spectral, or insubstantial, or ghostly in any way. He just seems solid and real, and alive. I can talk to him and touch him, for a while, and there's no doubt in my mind after of what's happened. It's just that I feel like I'm doubting everything else, instead.

I'll start at the beginning, as much as I can do. I first met Gavin Milne not long after I moved to London, a little over five years ago. Gavin was a friend of friends, and in short order we became part of the same social circle, and then very close friends ourselves just as quickly. Physically we couldn't have been more opposite, with him so small and thin and pale, and it must have been quite funny to see us together, but on a personal level I don't think I've ever connected with anyone so deeply. Gavin was soft-spoken, incredibly kind, keenly intelligent and thoughtful even about the most trivial things in a way that was sort of humbling. I admired him as much as I enjoyed his friendship, and he was the best friend I ever had.

I don't know exactly when I fell in love with him. I think that it grew in me very gradually, a little more of it there every time I saw him, taking up more and more room. It's surprising, when I look back on it, that I was able to pretend for so long that I didn't know it for what it was. It was nothing I'd ever felt for anyone before, not with that singular power.

And then Gavin was diagnosed with stage IV stomach cancer.

It's not really enough to say it was a shock. I knew he'd been feeling ill lately, missing a lot of work and in some pain and not wanting to go out for meals together like we'd used to, but he'd always played it down quite a bit, and I guess I'd never really had any idea of how bad it was. To me, he'd almost seemed fine -- certainly not like he was _dying_ , and with some immediacy. I think Gavin might have been in denial about it too, to a certain degree, and that was why he'd put off going to a doctor for so long, even as it all got so bad. He'd always had trouble with his digestion, and sometimes things just get worse so gradually they're as bad as they can be before you even realise. That old saw about the frog in the boiling water.

So it was awful, of course. Devastating. He was scheduled for all kinds of treatments, drugs and chemotherapy and surgeries to try to ease some of the worst of what he'd suffer from it if left unchecked, but there were no illusions that he had very long. He'd just drawn a short straw, and it was over for him. Gavin didn't get on with his parents, and he wasn't seeing anyone, so our friends pulled in around him, looking after him and bringing him food and taking him to appointments. It turned into sort of the center of our world, looking after Gavin, and rightly so.

Except for me, I suppose. Probably Gavin's closest friend, who loved him so dearly, and when he needed me, I just wasn't there for him. Not like I should have been.

As much as the diagnosis cut Gavin's whole world in two, and selfish though it was, it did the same thing to mine. Faced with the reality that he was so ill, that he was going to die, I was going to lose him, I couldn't keep from admitting to myself any longer how I felt about him, and how utterly this was destroying me. I barely slept, barely ate, couldn't think or bear being in my own skin. I wandered through my own life like a ghost. And maybe there would have been some comfort in spending all the time we had left with him, helping everyone care for him, but...

I've always been terrified of death, and mortality, more than anything else in the world. What else matters, in the face of that? When I was a little boy, going to church with my family, I would sit in my folding chair every Sunday shaking with sour dread of the next time the preacher would begin to speak about the Kingdom of Heaven. It was meant to be the greatest thing we all wanted, the perfect reward for a life of goodness, but it frightened me so badly I couldn't possibly explain it. He would say _eternity_ and _forever_ and I would find myself helpless not to try to picture them -- concepts so huge that to my child's mind they always ended up feeling like threats, like the direst predictions of an inescapable fate. Of course I'd supposedly be in paradise, _if_ I'd made it there, dwelling at the Lord's right hand, but my body and my self and everything that was _me_ , as I knew me now, would be gone. I would be something I would no longer understand. And I would be it _forever_ , until neither time nor anything else had any meaning ever again. And that was only if I somehow managed to avoid the other possibility of what forever could be -- which, as I hit puberty and found I was watching the boys at school with much more interest than the girls, I increasingly became sure was anything but guaranteed.

Even as I grew up, and I decided I didn't really believe anymore in the faith I'd been raised with, that fear still haunted me. Sometimes I would find that my mind wandered and I wound up thinking too hard, on a train or in a shop, about the inevitability of the end, how I didn't know what death was but there was no way I would avoid finding out, and my whole body would clench, my face would close in on itself, I would lose my breath and no longer be able to think or move. It was embarrassing as hell when it happened in public, and I tried to avoid thinking about it altogether, but it always snuck back in somehow, like the idea was stalking me. All the things that led their way back to death, too -- disease, and illness, and all the inner workings of the body, all the ways it could go wrong; fluids and shit and vomit and contamination -- that all terrified me too, much the same way. I couldn't even think about it without shaking, and needing to sit down. Even the very few times at uni I drank enough that I made myself sick I wound up having panic attacks, balled up on the floor of the toilet and out of my mind with fear.

So I cared about Gavin, I _loved_ Gavin, I swear that I did. I _wanted_ to be there beside him as he tried to bear all this and face the end of his life as best he could... but every time I thought about seeing him in his hospital room, being a part of all the anguish and effluvia of his dying body, having to take it for his sake and not being able to escape any of it, not being able to escape that something like it was out there at the end of the road waiting for me too, for all of us... I couldn't stand it, couldn't bring myself to do it. I fell apart, panicked, wept and shook and shut down. I _couldn't_ go to him, couldn't give him what he needed, even now. I was too afraid, and I let my fear make him lose me. And make me lose him.

I didn't completely disappear; I guess at least I can say that. I texted him, and called him sometimes. I even visited once or twice, when I could muster myself up enough; I brought flowers, tried to avoid looking at him, and fled as soon as I could. But for as close as we had previously been, it was unmistakable that I was pulling back and away from him, and he and everybody else knew it. I never had the sense that Gavin even blamed me for it, on the few occasions that I saw him, which only made me feel worse, but t I know our other friends did. When I got the email -- the _email_ , for fuck's sake -- from a former mutual friend that Gavin had passed away the night before, its stark last line at the bottom was "If you even care."

And there was no way to explain that I did care, I cared enough to destroy me, and no reason anyone should listen even if I could. What did it matter? It didn't change how I had acted. I accepted my distance from Gavin's death, my loss of all my closest friends, as only my due. No one ever so much as invited me to a wake.

Somehow I stumbled through the next month, a shadow of myself. I took some time off from work, but then I couldn't explain why I needed more, so I just had to soldier through. I went through the motions, stayed something like alive. Nothing seemed to mean anything anymore.

Until the evening when I came home from work, let myself into my flat after another dragging pointless day with no sense or colour in it, and found Gavin sat waiting for me on my sofa.

You know in a dream, when someone or something is still there that shouldn't be, but you just don't question it at the time? It's only when you wake up after that you realise that they're actually gone, and the ache settles back into place, all the more so for that little reprieve. It was very much like that. It should have felt absolutely wrong, even frightening, to see Gavin there when he was dead, but it didn't. It didn't even occur to me to realise there was something wrong with it. Not even the fact that he looked well and ordinary and exactly like his old self, with all his hair and colour and energy back, was able to trouble me. I had been far removed from his death, it was true, but even if our friend had only been fucking with me in some monstrous way and he actually hadn't died, someone with terminal cancer wasn't about to just turn up as though nothing had ever happened. But none of that registered, when I saw him, nor even the far more mundane oddity of his having apparently just let himself into my flat unannounced.

Instead, I just beamed, delighted to see him. I remember thinking it had been so long that I hadn't seen him, and I was grateful that he had visited, and that was all. I asked him to wait while I put my work things away, and asked if he wanted a drink, and he said sure. And we... talked, I think. I don't really remember it clearly, somehow. I have an idea of what happened, more than a memory, also a bit like I dreamed it. I'll hasten to add, though, that I _didn't_. I was at work beforehand, I came straight home, and I found him there. At no point was I asleep.

But even so, I can only remember that we talked, and spent some time together. I think I told him how happy I was to see him, and how much I'd missed him while we'd been apart. And that made his eyes soften and warm on mine, and he leaned in closer, making my mouth go dry... and he kissed me. He kissed me, and then asked me if that was all right, and I barely managed to say of course it was, I had wanted it for so long. So we did it again. And again.

We made our way to my bedroom, eventually, shedding clothes and laughing at ourselves and touching. I laid my bare body out on top of his on my mattress and kissed him again, for as long as I could, with him clinging to me and touching me. I told him that I loved him, and I had always loved him, and he looked so happy. He touched my cheek, and he was real, and in my arms, and it was all I had wanted.

I went down on him, putting every bit of myself into sucking his cock, touching myself as I did. It was warm and languid and slow, with his hands running over my skin where he could reach and his breath heavy and loud in the quiet dimness. I clung to his breath, clung to the beat of his pulse in his inner thigh close to my ear. Every sign that he was alive here with me.

Gavin moaned under me, and arched his back, and shivered, as I rolled my tongue over him and came closer to coming with every second I tasted his skin. When he finally came in my mouth, I don't think I could remember ever having been so grateful for anything before. He was so beautiful.

I finished myself off right where I was after he'd done, clinging to his leg and with my lips pressed into the skin of his thigh. He was all I could taste, all I could smell, and all I wanted to, all that I wanted there to be in the world. Even after I had gotten off, for a moment I could only lie there, collapsed, trembling in the curl of his limbs. I never wanted to move, and I never wanted to go anywhere else; I only wanted to be here, where I had wanted to be for so long, forever. The most I could finally stir myself to do was crawl up along his body and collapse beside him, and fold him into my arms when he tucked into my chest. And eventually, I must have fallen asleep like that, holding him.

When I woke up, it was because I was cold: shivering with it, in fact. Even when I opened my eyes, I was completely disorientated at first with not being able to work out where I was. Instead of my bed under me, as it should have been, I found myself stretched out on cold and hard earth, with a tickle of dried winter grass under my face and my hands. It took me a moment to blink and gasp and strain myself up to sitting, but when I did and I could focus my eyes, nothing made any more sense than it had before. I wasn't in my flat at all, but outside, early on a grey and chilly morning, wearing not just my skin or pajamas but the suit I had worn to work the day before. Around me was a grassy hill dotted with occasional trees, and lined with grey stones and monuments and plaques, and a mausoleum a little ways away with its bright stained glass made dull by the overcast light. A cemetery, I soon realised, with my chest tightening up and my heart seeming to squeeze up into the back of my throat.

I already knew what I would see when I turned around. But I had to look, didn't I? In a moment like that, a moment that shouldn't exist like that, there's nothing you can do but look.

At no point had I ever seen Gavin's grave, or its marker, never visited or learned where it was. But now I had, and now I knew. Because there it was behind me, in all the stark reality of stone, showing me exactly on whose grave I'd been asleep. Waking me from the dream that hadn't been a dream, back to the reality where he was gone and always would be.

It took some doing, that day, to negotiate how to get home from that cemetery I'd never been to, relying on transit and my phone's GPS. It doesn't anymore, though. By now, I've learned the route very well, and how to traverse it in the mornings when I wake up. I think one of the great horrors of the human condition is how able we are to adapt to almost anything, and I've managed to make something of a routine of climbing stiff and cold up off Gavin's grave, finding a taxi or a rideshare and avoiding the driver's questions, getting home and preparing whatever I'd happened to be wearing to be laundered. I've had to, one way or another. It's a little easier the times I can keep from sobbing the whole way.

Because he's kept coming back. Every few weeks or every few months, with no sort of pattern I can determine, when everything else in my life is ordinary, Gavin suddenly turns up. On a train I'm taking, or a pub or cafe where I've decided to stop in for something to drink, or just meeting me on a street corner as I'm walking somewhere. It's never odd to see him, nor do I ever remember in the moment how many times it's happened before. I always just accept it, and enjoy being with him, and eventually I tell him I love him. I loved him. And he accepts that the same way, and he's happy, or he kisses me, or both. Sometimes we spend the night in bed together, but sometimes we just spend it sitting together, his shoulder against mine or our hands linked.

And every time, I wake up on the grave again. I see Gavin's name there, inexorable as the stone it's carved in, waiting for me. And all the pain, and terror, and misery of a life that stretches out before me without him is able to overtake me freshly. It gets one more bite out of me, every time, and I really don't know how much longer it'll be before there's nothing left.

It makes sense that it would be this way, because we can adapt to most anything, right? In time I could have grieved, I suppose, and dealt with my guilt and my sorrow in some ordinary way, and even moved on, as hideous and ghoulish as that seems from where I stand. To keep hurting me -- to keep _enjoying_ hurting me, as I'm increasingly certain it is -- whatever it is that's doing this to me has to keep it fresh. Find a way to drive the knife all the way in every time. So it happens like this: having Gavin back, for a little while, or thinking I do... and then being confronted one more time with the place he's gone and the place that's waiting for me, the only place we'll ever both be together again. But it won't be a reunion. We just both won't exist.

Which increasingly, as this goes on over and over again, is coming to seem to me like it's still preferable to the alternative.

So maybe that's the final irony after all, isn't it? Maybe I've actually beaten my fear at last. Maybe all I ever had to do was finally find life so miserable that I'm no longer so afraid of its end.

\------

Statement ends.

\------

It seemed to take a long moment for Jon to settle back into his skin when it was done, and catch himself again. Longer still for either of them to speak. Finally, though, he cleared his throat, blinking at the pages as he set them down. "Well, that's... not quite what I expected."

"I doubt many of them get that spicy," Oliver said, drawing Jon's eyes up to his little smile -- for the few seconds before it faded away, anyway. "Or quite that sad. Though I guess I'm less sure about that."

Jon didn't really have a response for that; it was true, as far as he was aware, but honestly statements sort of ran together for him these days. After a moment Oliver's gaze just drifted away into middle distance, becoming unfocused.

"We get so little time, and even that can be so hard," he said quietly, enough so to almost seem as though it were to himself. "It's awful to think you missed a chance at really being happy, for at least some of it. At having something or someone worth doing it for." He sighed a little, taking another sip of his drink, while Jon could only sit in numb silence. "I still think about Graham sometimes, you know -- my ex. It's been a long time, but I do miss him. Every now and then I wonder where he is, what ended up happening to him." After another brief pause, his eyes shifted back to Jon's, though he otherwise stayed still. "I know you could tell me," he added, just as mildly and even more quietly, though there was no mistaking it for casual. "Don't."

Jon only nodded, for lack of anything better to say. It at least won him another bit of a smile, and that made it easier to gather his voice again for something else, instead.

"Why are you here?" he ended up asking, cautiously -- and being careful to concentrate a moment, and prevent compulsion from lacing into the question. Oliver had certainly been far friendlier than average for his kind, tonight and previously, but there was no sense needlessly provoking him. "I mean, not that I don't appreciate the drink."

Oliver's smile broadened, and he turned fully back to face Jon, folding his hands in front of him. "I told you. I wanted to say hello now you're doing better. Well. Relatively, it looks like, if you don't mind my saying."

"Yes, so I've heard," Jon muttered, and fidgeted with his own drink -- which he was surprised to finally notice was almost empty as well. Had he actually read a statement whilst sipping a beer without realising it? God, how ghoulish of him.

"But yeah. No harm in being friendly." Oliver shrugged. "To be honest, I've never much seen the point of all the politics and nastiness some of the others seem to get up to. It's not as if there isn't enough to go around."

It was hard to know what to say to that, either. Nor, Jon found, did he care at all to ask what Oliver might have followed in order to find him here. "Is that... really all?" he tried, instead. It made Oliver smile again, and more warmly than ever.

"Doesn't have to be, I suppose," he said, at the end of a brief pause, and there was a shade of something darker now in the curl of his lips, and at his eyes. Not in a threatening way, either. "You know, I've never been in here before, though I must've walked past it a few times when I worked nearby. It's nice, I can see why you all picked it tonight. Toilets included -- they're very clean, and a single stall each, so there's a nice bit of privacy." His eyes lingered on Jon's, knowingly. "I was thinking, before I leave, I might pop into the one on the far end, and wait around a while. And if you were of a mind, you could come give four taps on the door, so I know it's you and I can let you in. We could see what happens from there."

Once again Jon found himself entirely off his balance -- just staring wide-eyed at Oliver, who continued looking back at him. For a moment Oliver didn't speak again: he only finished off his drink and set the glass down, and leaned back, clearly preparing to get up.

"Though if you're not of a mind, that's okay too," he added, genially enough, just before he did. "But I'll be waiting for a while, just in case." He shot Jon another quick smile. "I'm nothing if not patient."

Then he gave a bit of a nod, and stood up from the booth, walking away into the crowds at an easy pace. Leaving his empty glass on the tabletop, and Jon sitting with eyes frozen on where he had been.

There was no point in even noting that it was a bad idea; it was so obvious it hardly needed to be pointed out. Oliver had seemed pleasant enough thus far, yes, but it was still wildly unwise to assume he could be trusted. And Jon had already been out longer than he really should, and had no need to push his luck, certainly not for sex with a relative stranger in a pub restroom. He could admit to himself that reading the statement had stirred a certain amount of secondhand arousal in him, alongside the fear and sorrow and misery, at the parts where the poor man had recollected his tender encounters with the dead; but that had been only one dish in a much larger meal. Its foreign heat might have made the idea of sex appeal to him more than how little it normally did, but it wasn't enough to hide behind as an excuse. It would be nothing he couldn't ignore, if he chose to walk away.

He just didn't want to walk away. This was nothing he needed, not remotely safe, and none of that was enough to outweigh the surge of pathetic longing he felt when he thought of being held close to another warm body, and touched by someone who didn't mean to hurt him -- as though he really were just as human and whole as all the strangers around him, who'd see him that way at a glance if they bothered to look at him at all. And if it wasn't the precise someone he really wanted to be within reach... well, since when did what he wanted matter in all this? An avatar of another power who called him _Jon_ and not _Archivist_ was already better than he had any right to expect.

The dregs of his drink as he tossed them back, before packing up and getting up himself, were lukewarm by now, and almost unbearably bitter on his tongue. But that suited as well, didn't it?

Jon kept his head down as he pushed through the crowd, deliberately avoiding looking at the ordinary people around him who could so easily come to look like prey. Fortunately the alcove with the lavatories wasn't far, and he made his way down to the end, to the door Oliver had identified. He tapped it four times without even letting himself hesitate first.

It opened at once, and Oliver stood there, smiling just as before -- not even giving him time to worry that he'd missed his window even so and this would just be a ridiculous failure. Even as Jon hesitated in spite of himself, no longer sure at all what to do now he was here, Oliver stepped aside, making space for him to come in.

"Glad you made your choice," he said -- softly now, perhaps to avoid being heard from any occupants of the other stalls. "Come on."

He shut and locked the door behind Jon after, sealing them both into the narrow little tiled room. Jon hovered just in front of the door, watching Oliver with what felt almost like wariness, until Oliver took apparent pity on him and leaned in. He really was tall, and had to brace his arm on the wall behind Jon to comfortably bend down enough to bring their mouths together, but he did it slowly and carefully and deliberately -- not trapping Jon in, giving him time to change his mind.

Jon didn't. He watched Oliver move closer to him, distantly aware that his eyes felt very wide, and finally focused them on Oliver's mouth near the end. Then he leaned forward himself, timidly, to close the space that remained into a kiss.

Oliver made a warm, pleased little sound, and curled his other arm around Jon's waist. Jon went with it, unresisting, to press up against him, and found that leaning up against his body felt reassuring, an undeniably real and solid thing that at least seemed nothing but ordinary. The touch of his mouth was warm and soft and gentle, his lips dry on Jon's for now but with a promise of heat and wet on the tickle of his breath. It gradually seemed possible for Jon to place a hand on his hip, another at the nape of his neck, holding him in and close.

It didn't stay dry and soft for long. Soon Oliver's mouth had opened against his and parted Jon's lips with it, the delicate touch of his tongue making itself known here and there. Jon found his back up against the wall beside the door, Oliver holding him there with only his weight as he just as quickly diverted from Jon's mouth, trailed his lips down the the line of Jon's neck with the occasional nip that made Jon hiss and shudder. Hands roamed over Jon's back, his sides, his belly and chest, and they were long and thin and graceful and perfectly nice, Jon supposed. It all felt good, as deep as his skin: a warm body and mouth and caressing touch, waking his nerves and blood on the animal level. Something, someone, to hold onto for a while and feel alive.

And he wasn't thinking about Martin tonight. He'd told himself.

They had been kissing, touching, and rolling together for some time when the first touch came that wasn't part of Oliver's body: a light, questing pressure climbing up the inside of Jon's leg from the calf, up around his knee and over his thigh before he managed to register it. He broke away from Oliver's mouth with a small indrawn breath when he did -- though Oliver's hand that had been brushing his cheek firmed there suddenly, gently preventing him from looking down at the intruder. It felt cold, Jon was aware, even through his trouser-leg, and it wound its way up around his leg with the flexible, muscular undulation of a large snake, the kind that would wrap prey in its coils. It was hard to say whether he would have been able to see it or not, even if Oliver had let him look. As it was, he only stared into Oliver's face, wide-eyed all over again, and Oliver gave him a little smile that was nearly apologetic.

"That all right?" he asked in a murmur, his thumb tracing idly over the shape of Jon's kiss-swollen lips. "Just sort of happens, it seems like. I can try not to let them, if you'd rather."

Jon swallowed, which he was sure was unmistakable, but after a moment he managed to shake his head. "No," he said, and winced inside at the frayed, papery rattle that was his voice. "It's fine."

He wasn't sure if that was even true, entirely, but it felt like what he wanted to say. It made Oliver's smile broaden, at least. They were kissing again quickly, and when the pressing, questing thing sought higher up his thigh and finally slipped up to squirm against the clothed rise of his cock, he just let out a shuddering sigh against Oliver's mouth, and let it.

There were more, gradually, every time his attention drifted back. Several more coiling up his legs, wrapping them and sliding between his thighs, and another slithering over his hip, still another curling around his middle from behind. Like Oliver, they didn't restrain him but only held him, touched him, explored the shapes of him. He was quite sure it was Oliver's hands that undid the front of his trousers and began pushing them down his hips, as Oliver just leaned on the top of his head now, but just as sure that it was one of those curious shapes that then slid in and up his shaft in a deliberately teasing, glancing wriggle. Its coldness on that overheated skin made him gasp and twitch, but not in an unpleasant way. The sharp difference in temperature just made for a startling, potent sensual interplay: bringing to mind an ice cube being traced down hot flesh, but without melting as it went. It was no less shocking the second time, nor when the tendrils brushed his skin in the course of finishing for Oliver the job of undressing him from the waist down. He was hard enough to be twitching and leaking by the end of it, his breath coming in quick shallow gulps.

Oliver kissed him, and stroked his chest and hair with warm human hands, and the tendrils wrapped his thighs and gently drew them wide, making room for themselves to climb and squirm over him from below. They caressed around and over his cock and balls, his inner thighs, the curves of his ass and between to his perineum. Jon leaned on Oliver's shoulder and struggled for his breath in high thin gasps, completely overwhelmed by foreign sensation. The things prodding at his rear felt slick, comparatively, though he didn't have any idea why and didn't really care to know, and when Oliver murmured another question to him he only nodded hard against Oliver's chest, his eyes squeezed shut and a little cry shaping his breath.

He lost track of things, after the first tendril began to push its way inside him, squirming up along his inner walls in a rippling, inching way nothing else could ever have replicated. At some point he was dimly aware of being hoisted off his feet, his thighs and waist wrapped into secure coils, and drawn up along the wall with his splayed legs hiked up and his body stretching to fit around writhing weight. It was a height that seemed to make things easier for Oliver, at least, and sometimes he was there, mouthing Jon's neck, his hand a searingly hot place amidst all the cold in its wrap around Jon's cock. Sometimes he wasn't there, and he must have been only standing back, and watching.

Jon let it happen. The shudders and twitches and hungry cries that wrenched out of him occasionally seemed a little distant from him, the pleasure his own but also hardly anything to do with him at all. There was a freedom in it, the way he drifted inside it, in the darkness behind his eyes.

It was good, to feel good. To be cared for, even if in this bizarre way. He was grateful. And if he also ached, with a rotten hollowness all the way down ot the center of him, that was nothing that Oliver deserved to have put on him. It was no one's fault but his own: his own insecurities and blindness and fear, the suspicions and avoidances that had consumed him for so long. They had made a mess of so many things, led to so many losses. In many ways this one was actually the least dramatic of them, so why was it the one that he couldn't stop obsessing over, poking in his mind like a sore tooth?

He was afraid for Martin, sent spiraling into anxiety by not knowing what was _happening_ to Martin, what might yet become of him. What Martin could think he was doing, alone like this. But he couldn't pretend the whole of it was anything near so selfless. He _wanted_ Martin, with a childish petulance, with a broken longing that made him feel like something had been cut out of him, a ragged hole through his side or chest that left the raw meat of him naked. Sometimes the need to just see Martin, to talk to him and know that he was still present and real, felt like it would eat its way all the way through him, consume everything warm and human that was left. It was partly loneliness, certainly, and it was partly just wanting familiarity and comfort, something to still be the way it had been. But it wasn't only those things, and he couldn't tell himself it was. It was...

His lips still felt chafed and warm and sensitive from kissing at so much length: a sensation whose innocence in his focus was almost obscene, in contrast to how one of the tendrils was thrusting in his ass hard enough to make him bounce in the grasp of the others, while another smaller one was beginning to try to stretch him enough to let it crawl in beside. Under normal circumstances, he'd really rather kiss someone than go as far as any of this any day of the week, though what was normal anymore? Martin had been interested in him, once, and it would have been possible to kiss Martin once: if he'd chosen to, if he'd thought to, if he hadn't spent all his time between taking Martin for granted and drawing away for Martin's own safety and not wanting to trust Martin's constant, earnest support. He could have had that, once. Not anymore. Quite likely not ever again.

With his eyes squeezed shut, and the endless lines that led inescapably toward endings working inside him and around him to lead him closer to his own, Jon could almost picture what that would have been like. The surprise, and then happiness, lighting up Martin's round, kind face. How it would feel to be drawn in close to the warm, sturdy size of him: the softness of touching him, the gentle push of his belly, the sheer comfort of the heavy circle of his arms. He would need to bend down and Jon would need to stretch up, for their mouths to brush tentatively, and then press tighter. He could hold on to Martin for his balance, and find it that way, with Martin's breath warm over his lips and all of Martin close to him, and his to hold, and safe.

He couldn't say that he didn't notice when he reached his climax, because he did. But it was an abstract sort of relief, a high fever's breaking. He would have made _far_ more noise than was appropriate for their setting had his mouth not been covered with the icy touch of one of those tendrils. The chill of it seemed to freeze the vibrations as they left his mouth, until there was nothing but silence coming from his lips. It was just as well; he hadn't had anything of his own to say in a very long time.

As he slumped back against the wall, closing his eyes as he gathered his breath, he began to realize that the two of them were alone again -- at least, as alone as either of them ever got, considering their respective patrons. Jon rubbed a hand across his face, then set about straightening his own clothes. He was surprised to find that there was no mess to clean before he could fasten his trousers again, and he resolved not to think too deeply about that one.

When Jon looked up again, Oliver was standing close -- not so close as to make Jon uncomfortable, but certainly closer than two men tended to find themselves in a public restroom. With the quiet tenderness that seemed to be his hallmark, Oliver brushed a strand of hair from Jon's face and tucked it back behind his ear.

"I hope you haven't missed _your_ chance," Oliver said softly, his fingers curled against Jon's cheek. "Truly I do. But if it does turn out that you have ... well, you might get in touch sometime, yeah? Dance card's pretty open these days."

Despite the circumstances, and everything else, Jon found his lips curling in a little smile. "Is there a reliable way to get your attention that _isn't_ a six-month coma?"

Oliver outright laughed at that. "I was thinking the telephone, actually. Now, I'm sure you could just _know_ it, but..." He pulled his phone from his jacket and slid it open to the number pad, then held it up for Jon. "Call yourself."

Jon did as instructed, tapping in the digits. A moment after hitting send, his back pocket began to buzz.

Oliver nodded and disconnected the call. "There. I've got yours, and you've no excuse for not having mine."

Fair enough, Jon supposed. Trading numbers seemed so incongruously normal, especially after being ravished by what he couldn't help thinking of as "death tentacles", despite the sense that such nomenclature was disrespectful at best. He wanted to say that wasn't the strangest thing that had happened to him, but the truth was he'd stopped keeping count years ago. Now there were no strange things. There were just things, and there weren't things. This was a thing. His relationship with Martin wasn't. The world spun only forward.

After tucking his phone away again, Oliver gave Jon a moment's thoughtful look. "D'you want a hug?" he ventured.

Jon found himself baffled, as though the sentence had somehow come forth in the only language he couldn't understand. "A ... hug?"

"Yeah," Oliver said with a sympathetic smile. "You've got the look of a man who could use one. And as long as we're being honest, I'll tell you I know that look from the mirror."

"Yes," Jon said, almost rushing out the word before any self-conscious worry could block him. "Yes, I rather would."

Oliver opened his arms and Jon fell into them, pressing his face against the soft, fine fabric of Oliver's shirt. This close, Oliver smelled of dark, rich things, of good soil and starless nights. His presence was comforting in its steadiness, a stability Jon hadn't felt for what seemed like years now. His arms held strong around Jon as though promising he'd always be there in the end. Of that, at least, Jon had no doubt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Statement CWs:  
> -detailed discussion of fear of mortality  
> -terminal illness/cancer as part of the story  
> -mention of panic attacks and vomiting  
> -guilt  
> -implied passive suicidal ideation
> 
> Post-statement CWs:  
> -sex in semi-public  
> -tentacles  
> -sad


	13. Bad Gateway

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See notes at the end for content warnings for this chapter.

Statement of Julie Han, regarding a website of a salacious nature:

(First line of original text redacted and illegible.)

That's the address it was at when I found it, for all the good it'll do you. It's gone now, of course. That's half the point of my being here, isn't it? If it were still there, I could still try to find out more about it myself. But it's gone, and I can't. So that's why I came to you.

Obviously it's not a proper text URL anyway, it's just a dotted quad. That's all I ever had in the first place. I don't think it was ever meant to be easy to get to, or remember, even before it disappeared. Who knows how many times it's disappeared already? Maybe it pops back up later, over and over again. That's the theory I'm working on, anyway.

I found it on a discussion forum, on one of the big websites that hosts those. I'm not going to say which, for my own protection, but if I did, you'd probably know it. I don't really post much, but I hang around some of the kink discussion threads, just to see if anything interesting comes through. Of course I know there's easier ways to get porn, that's not really what I'm looking for exactly -- I just like observing the conversation other people are having, seeing how it affects them and how they think about this stuff. Especially when it comes to kinky sex, people can twist themselves into all kinds of knots, putting on personas or deluding themselves about what something means, in a way that's obvious to everyone except them. It's sort of an interesting social experiment, to watch it. Although, don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to be superior or academic about it, I get off on it like everybody else. Not to mention it's nice to have people you could talk to even when you're up in the middle of the night, and I've always worked and slept irregular hours.

So one night around three in the morning, I couldn't sleep, so I had my laptop in bed and I was just refreshing the board. And a really weird message came through. No subject line, and nothing listed for the user name, which shouldn't have been possible. I thought at first it must have been some sort of site glitch, sort of funny really, and I clicked through to make a joke reply on the thread about "ooh, beware the spooky forum ghosts" or some such.

But when I opened the message, I could see the body of it, which somehow hadn't shown up on the preview on the board -- which it really should have, since it was short enough. It was just what I wrote at the top of the paper here. The dotted quad, exactly like I wrote it out. I memorised it well enough I'm sure I'll never forget it.

Look, I'm not an idiot. I knew when I saw it most likely it was a recipe for a big fat batch of malware on my hard drive, at best. But I've got a good virus scanner, with a browser plugin so sensitive it jumps all over sites as "dangerous" just for having ads sometimes, so I actually wasn't too worried about running into anything without it letting me know first -- and honestly, I just couldn't help myself. It was late, and I was bored, and the whole thing was so weird that of course I was curious. So I copied and pasted the address -- it hadn't even auto-formed into a link, there was so little to it -- and put it into a new browser tab.

The site wasn't much to look at, on first glance. Bit of a relic, actually, you'd think. It was just a bare page, with a tiled pattern background, of all things, although at least it wasn't too eye-bleeding of a one. On it were rows of thumbnail images, maybe 12 or so fitting on the screen at a time, which were clearly links -- so unstyled that they had those bright blue outline boxes around them. From what I could see, all of the thumbnail images were of pairs or groups of people having various types of sex. I clicked on the one in the upper left, which looked like a man frozen in fucking a woman who was in some light bondage gear and held upside-down in a sling, and sure enough, it went through to just a video file playing in the browser, of exactly that. It wasn't long, and it was definitely very much amateur -- the quality looked like it was shot on somebody's phone, and they were in a tight blank corner like they'd just pushed all the furniture out of the way in a living room -- but it was good. I mean, nothing wild, but they both seemed really into it and giving it all they had, and they were both really fit and nice to look at. It was already starting to get me pretty turned on, so I grabbed my vibrator out of the bedside drawer and kept looking. Might as well, if I couldn't sleep anyway and I'd stumbled on somebody's nice little collection.

As I went down the page, the thumbnails kept going to videos in that vein: short segments of lightly kinky sex, a little spanking here, a little foot stuff there. All of them looked shot in the same place with the same camera, although a pretty impressive number of different people appeared from one to the next. They were all worth watching, too: everyone seemed really into it and genuinely turned on. Even the quality aside, after a bit it started to feel like this was really quite a lot of decent work to be giving away for free. And it just kept scrolling, and the scenes seemed to just get more complicated as I went along: getting up to four or five people, using some pretty substantial furniture to get into position, and changing up the logistics. There was enough of it and it was all so hot that I'd come three different times before I was finally so worn out I gave up for the night. I saved the link, though, and I left it open in a tab, to come back to later. I was glad later that I had, too: by actual morning, the post with the dotted quad had completely disappeared from the forum, and none of the other usual night owls I messaged about it seemed to know what I was talking about.

Come back to it I definitely did, though, and I was in a pretty good mood for the next couple of days there, if a bit sore at times. It was hard to stop thinking about it even when I was at work, to be honest. I really felt like I'd lucked out getting a hold of this link; it was rare for me to find something I liked as much and as consistently as this. But though I didn't want to look the gift horse in the mouth, the more time I spent with it, the more questions I did have about where this site had come from and who these people were. It was completely unlabeled as far as I could see, even the filenames of the images and videos just seeming to be completely random alphanumeric strings. No one in the videos even spoke, that I heard, let alone said a name.

After a while I opened up the source code to take a look at it, wondering if there was some trace of identity buried in there or commented out or some such. I didn't expect much, and at most for it to be cluttered up with the sort of crud you get making My First Webpage in Word or the like. But to my surprise, it wasn't. The code was actually very tight, neat, professional, and even elegant -- good Lord, even that awful background was actually applied with perfect CSS. If you're familiar with the basics of front-end web design at all -- which even I am really only a little, mostly from having been an online sort of person socially since long before "social media" even existed -- the whole thing was just _weird_ , totally incongruous between what showed on the front of the website and what was actually coded in the back. It was a bit like watching a movie that's a period piece, and it's done fine, but if you know what you're looking at you can tell the women have all got modern bras on underneath, or their hair's still got that beachy wave everyone has on television now. It throws you right out of it, and all of a sudden you're hyper-aware that what you're looking at is all put on. But why? Who on earth would use their professional web programming skills to make a dated, incompetent-looking website on purpose, let alone go to that effort for a completely bare-bones porn site without even a full URL to its name?

Even if the porn hadn't been any good, at this point, the sheer mystery of it would have been dragging me in. I started poring over the whole thing from the top, even when I wasn't in the mood to get off, looking for any sort of clue as to what it was all about. And though I would have sworn there was nothing out of the ordinary about it before, once I started really looking, I started to see more.

Have you ever seen that awareness test thing, where you're supposed to watch the basketball being passed, and you totally miss the entire moonwalking bear in the middle of the video? Look it up sometime, if you haven't, I have a feeling it might be more relevant to you lot than you might think. Anyway, when I finally hit on going back through each of the videos from the beginning, I realised that I'd been so busy getting off on the sex that I'd missed the moonwalking bear, so to speak. In every few videos or so, somewhere in the video, there was a letter or a number. In some of them it flashed up in the corner of the screen partway through, small and transparent and unassuming. In others it was written on the wall behind the participants. In at least one, one of the two men spitroasting a third actually signed a letter in BSL finger-spelling while he was pumping his hips. And of course I hadn't noticed a bit of it, because I'd been busy having orgasms. I went through all the videos in order, finding the characters, and noting them down. Then I looked at them, sorted them around, and tried a couple of things. What finally worked was so simple it was a bit stupid in retrospect: putting a backslash after the dotted quad of the site address, and putting the whole string in order after it.

That opened a new page. And it was quite a bit different from the one before. Not in the way it looked -- the layout was actually more or less exactly the same, except that it had a different twisty tiled background, which I assumed was sort of a joke by this point -- but in the content. It was still short videos, still shot in apparently that same corner of a room, still sexually explicit, but they were all just... a bit weirder. Something about each of them was just off, a little disconcerting. There was one shot from down on the floor where a woman was masturbating, her legs and lips spread wide to the camera, but a couple seconds into the video she started sneezing, and she kept sneezing nonstop through the whole rest of the video, even when she got off. In another one, there was a man bent over a chair getting fucked from behind by a woman with a strap-on, but there was also an entire, live sheep, just stood there on the floor and looking around. The sheep was actually more toward the centre of the frame, and the man and woman off-centre to one side like an afterthought. That one was actually rather funny -- once it was clear nobody was going to be fucking the sheep, which I hadn't really signed on for. Then there was one that was close-up and tight on a woman's face while she was doing a long, elaborate job of fellating a handgun like it was a cock, her arm and shoulder clearly going like she was getting herself off out of frame, and the whole time staring with her eyes a little unnaturally wide straight at the camera. The video was almost two minutes long, and I'm almost certain she never blinked once.

By this point, I was starting to think this was less "amateur porn site" and more "somebody's performance art project," but that didn't really explain things any better. At the very least, more so than ever, it seemed like a hell of a lot of work for something that hardly anybody was going to see. Almost the weirder thing for me, though, was that as off-kilter as all those videos were, I was still getting off on them -- just as hard as I had on the more conventional first page, if not harder. Something about it, maybe the oddity or the slight startlement of seeing these things happening, or how just a little bit taboo it all was, or the little bit uncomfortable that the participants had started to seem, just made it take my breath away. I came again and again to those videos too, and I couldn't seem to stop.

Not to mention that having gotten this far, of course I suspected that there might be more to it still. Even when I was too exhausted for another orgasm, I was spending all my time that I wasn't at work, night and morning, scouring the page and looking for more clues. I mean, if it really did keep going, and what I'd stumbled on was like a puzzle game, leading to secret stashes of increasingly weird really hot porn? It's hard for me to imagine that anything could be _more_ exactly my sort of thing.

There was still nothing in the source code, and no hidden letters or numbers in the videos this time, but after a while I noticed the characters of the video filenames seemed to follow more of a formula than they had before. It wasn't long before I recognised them as hex colour codes, and when I looked up the standard names... well, I suppose you don't need all the details. Suffice it to say, I found the next page. And the next. And the next.

I can never forget some of the things I saw in those videos. It seems like they're floating behind my eyes when I close them sometimes, and always waiting for me when I fall asleep. There was one where a man was sat naked and blindfolded and bound to a chair, and an unnaturally stick-thin arm reached in from out of frame, over much too great a distance, to touch his cock. The arm didn't really even look human, its skin a scabby mottle of red and pink and puce, and its length bending at too many elbow-joints. The man winced and flinched when it touched him, grimacing and looking profoundly miserable in what I could see of his face, but he never got any less hard, and in fact he just kept panting and gasping until he came. Another one had two men fucking on the floor, really going hard, but as I watched the one on top opened his mouth wide, and wider and wider beyond all sense or possibility, until he closed it right over the man on bottom's head and bit down with a horrific crunching sound. There was the start of red welling around his horrible distended teeth, and then the video ended. In another, a man lay naked and hard on his side on the floor, facing the camera, completely expressionless while his body bulged and distorted and distended in strange ways: a sudden sharp angle pressing out the flesh of his hip here, a large round protrusion pushing out the side of his chest there, over and over, faster and faster. Finally his head was pulled up and _open_ like some sort of hinged mask, and a woman's head and arms pushed blood-smeared and squirming out of it, making it clear she'd been what was moving inside him. Still another video was just of a naked woman stood in front of the camera, staring into it with her face trembly and crumpling and her eyes exhausted and hollow, tears shining wetly on her face. She was shaking, and eventually there was some deafening, unrecognizable noise on the soundtrack, and she clapped her hands over her ears and cringed, and then bent double. When she stood back upright, her nose was bleeding profusely, but she broke into a dazed, wide smile. Then just as the video ended, she flew straight up and out of the top of the frame at a terrifying, impossible speed, and in the last frame painfully bright light was spilling in from somewhere overhead.

That wasn't the worst of them, either. I don't even want to write down the worst of them.

Of course I couldn't believe that they were real. I _didn't_ believe that they were real. Obviously it was still a prank, or some sort of art project, or _something_. There had to be hundreds of ways you could fake something like this, and I just didn't know what they were. It was impossible that any of the things I was seeing could actually have happened, and they were only videos online, completely out of context on a strange webpage. They weren't fact, nothing I'd seen with my own eyes.

They looked convincing, though. They looked real, even though they couldn't be. Enough so to introduce just a sliver of doubt into my mind. Just enough to make me go back and forth, not sure of my eyes, not sure of my mind, half-convincing myself that they really were real one second and then completely dismissing the idea the next.

I could barely sleep, and my nightmares were endless when I did, sending me thrashing and sweating all through the night like I had a high fever. And even so, the worse the videos got, the more terrifying the things I saw, the more utterly obsessed I was. I stopped going to work, first taking time off and then just not turning up, so I could spend all day and all night scouring the newest videos, getting off to them in a frenzy and then scouring them for any proof of what they were one way or another. And looking through the page for clues to the next, when I was done with it. It was all I did and all I wanted to do. I ate in front of the screen, slept only when I dropped, could hardly even bring myself to stop long enough to go to the toilet. And there were so _many_ pages. So many videos. I went weeks like that, nearly a month, and never came to an end.

What I did come to, though, at long last, was a page without a puzzle. Or I suppose it did have one, of a sort, but it was nothing at all compared so some of the fiendish complexities of the ones I had solved before. It was also the first page that broke the formula -- tiled background with spiraling lines, rows of increasingly horrific pornographic thumbnails to increasingly horrific pornographic videos -- though only at the very bottom. All the other thumbnails were the same, but the very last one, in the very bottom right, was just an image of an empty chair in a dark space. And when I clicked on it, I couldn't even immediately tell if I was looking at a video or a still image: it was just the same chair, sat there in a circle of light, everything beyond it dark.

But my pointer turned to a pointing hand, when it hovered over the chair itself. So I clicked it.

On the next page, the background was plain black. And there was only one thumbnail, only one image, large and in the center of the page: the same one, of the chair. It was definitely a video, though, when I clicked it, but it was just blackness at first, so I didn't understand right away what I was seeing. Then the view dipped, and I could see a pair of hands, bound to chair-arms and picked out brilliantly in strong light. I understood then: it was shot as though from the point of view of the person in the chair. Once I'd got that much, I could even recognise the sound of fast, panicky breathing on the audio, which I'd thought was only static noise before.

The most disconcerting thing, though, was that the quality of the video had changed from before, and there was now a timestamp rolling along through small green numbers at the bottom right corner of the screen. It matched the current time on my computer exactly, and my browser was showing that it was transferring data, streaming the video file instead of downloading it. It was, to all appearances, a live feed.

While I watched, the view jerked up again suddenly, to where shapes were beginning to emerge out of the darkness. A few of them, at first, and then more. And then many, _too_ many, so many I couldn't count them. They were just dark-on-dark silhouettes where they started, barely visible, and then as they got closer they began to throw back that light shining on whoever was in the chair. That person was beginning to make more noise than just breathing, come to that: little panicked whines and gasps, although muffled, as though through a gag.

The shapes were arms. Human arms, slim and not especially masculine or feminine, fairly nondescript in form except that they were not attached to any sort of body. Each of them ended just below where a shoulder would be, in a smooth, unmarred, rounded nub of flesh. They crawled toward the person in the chair, bit by bit, like inchworms: slapping out their hands, humping up at the elbow, and then dragging the end up behind to start all over again. That soft, rhythmic fleshy sound of their hands slapping, rapid-fire with so many of them doing it at odd times, was indescribable as it got closer. Another sound I've heard in my dreams more times than I can count.

In place of the chair-bound person's eyes, the view darted panicked from side to side, down and back up, fast and dizzying enough to blur the arms and make me feel sick. I found that I could even see the ceiling of whatever vast dark space the person was in, because some of the arms were crawling along it, in defiance of gravity. The first of them that started to enter the circle of light were on the floor, though: creeping up to the bare feet that the view snapped down to. The muffled voice rose up higher and higher in a buried scream as the hands began to crawl up the person's bound legs, grabbing handfuls of the flesh and then hauling themselves up, feeling their way along blindly. Rising up to the top of the frame, to where the view could no longer capture, and then the picture was wiped out in a blur of wild, frantic, unreadable motion.

Then it fell abruptly still, and one of the hands climbed up right into the center of the screen, right in front of my face. And it reached _out_. Toward the screen of my laptop, and then _through_ it, passing through with no resistance at all as though it were a window instead of a display. Into my room, where the computer sat on my bed. Toward _me_.

I didn't think. If I'd stopped to think I'm sure I wouldn't be here now. Moving purely on instinct, faster than I think I've ever moved before, I grabbed my laptop in both hands and threw it as hard as I could across my bedroom. It smashed against the wall at full force, shell cracking, screen shattering into meaningless smears of pixellated colour. By the time it hit the floor, even those had gone, into only dead darkness.

But the hand had gone as well. I sat there, gasping desperate breaths into my flattened lungs and every muscle in me clenched, staring across my room at only a completely broken laptop.

I was able to get it fixed, in the end. I know that sounds a bit mad, after _that_ happening, but what was I meant to do? I'd have to look for a new job sometime. The bloke at the repair shop looked at me extremely oddly at the state of the thing, but he didn't ask too many awkward questions, I'm glad to say. They did quite a good job on it, too -- though it turned out I'd done enough interior damage that they had to restore it more or less from scratch. They salvaged my files to an impressive degree, and I'm mostly in the cloud these days anyway... but of course, I did lose my browser tabs and history. I still had the original dotted quad, that had led me to the first page to begin with, but it was defunct, and long since, I suspect. All it would give me was the same 502 server error, over and over again. Just some sort of proxy itself, from what I understand.

So that's why I've come here, so you all can look for it again. Maybe find out what I never could, about how much of it was real, and how much was a lie. I know what I saw, of course. I know what happened. But I don't really... _know_ that I know. If that makes sense. Probably it doesn't. Not much does, anymore.

There's another reason I want you to find it again, though, and that's why I've left my contact information. If you do find it again, I'd really appreciate it if you'd get in touch with the new address. I know, I _know_ , that's even madder still. But even so.

It's a bit embarrassing, really. But ever since all this... I can't get off to anything else.

\------

Statement ends.

\------

Jon had no time to collect himself, though, before he was interrupted by the creak of a door opening. The _wrong_ creak for his office door, as well, though he was scarcely aware of noticing that, nor how familiar it nonetheless was by now. The knowledge was already in his mind, needing no help from his environs at all.

"What are you doing up here, Helen?" he asked without turning around, and as forbiddingly as possible whilst still trying to catch his breath. There weren't exactly footsteps coming into the room behind him, but there wasn't exactly anything else, either.

"Just satisfying a bit of curiosity," the thing that had been Helen said, in a bright cheerful tone that still made Jon's head feel a little like it wanted to turn inside out. "I apologise for barging in, but I could tell you were recording a particularly exciting little statement, shall we say?"

Jon opted to ignore that, though he finally turned a glower back over his shoulder at her. "A _pornographic website_?" he demanded instead -- although decorum still rather demanded he stay pulled in tightly to his desk, even in such dubious company. "Really?"

Helen shrugged, with a smirking nod in the direction of the tape recorder still spinning on his desk. " _Some_ of us have actually managed to keep pace with modernity. Did you know pornography receives fully thirty percent of the traffic on the internet?"

"Yes," Jon said, though largely because she'd no sooner said the words _did you know_ than he quite suddenly had. "Is that all, then? If you're planning to just fill my head with useless trivia, I'm afraid I already have someone for that."

Helen's smirk spread and broadened, into something that possibly had more angles in it than it should. "Actually, I thought you might be feeling a bit frisky after that big side helping of lust with your fear entrée, and I might try my luck," she said, with nothing but the same air of good cheer. "Physicality might be largely immaterial to me, but it can also be extremely entertaining."

Jon stared at her for a moment, fully unable to respond.

"Are you _propositioning me_?" he managed, at long last. "Is that something I'm expected to cope with now?"

"No need to be shy, Archivist," Helen said, saccharine-sweet and indulgent. "We're all friends here."

"First of all, _no we are not_ , and second--"

Helen cut him off, setting her ghastly hands on the vague idea of her hips. "Oh, come on. Everyone else has had a go, why shouldn't I?"

That brought Jon up short, blinking. "...What?"

Helen broke off in turn, and then appeared to consider. "Ohh, right you are, not in this continuity. I do beg your pardon. I'm forever getting my timelines mixed up."

" _What?_ " Jon repeated, with increasing furor, but she gave no sign of having heard him.

"Anyway, at least give it a moment's thought. I've cut my nails and everything."

" _I don't want to know what that means,_ " Jon said, as forcefully as he possibly could. "And regardless of what it might, if that's so, you've stopped several inches too soon."

"Hm. Body-shaming." Helen gave a disparaging sniff. "Hurtful. Inappropriate."

Jon took a deep breath, trying to collect all of the dignity he possibly still could. "No, thank you," he said at the end of it, enunciating every word in careful lines of ice. "I trust I don't need to show you the door, as you've brought it in with you."

"And shockingly rude, as well," Helen added, with no particular change in her tone. Jon only stabbed a finger straight at the door that shouldn't have been in the corner.

" _Out._ "

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Statement CWs:  
> -brief mention of being worried that a sheep is going to be fucked (it is not)  
> -pornography that includes body horror and disturbing imagery
> 
> Post-statement CWs:  
> -an Archivist being VERY rude to a guest


	14. Joining Forces

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See notes at the end for content warnings for this chapter.
> 
> AND THIS IS THE END!! Thank you so, so much for coming on this journey if you have, it was super fun and all your comments have been so nice and we love you.

Statement of Farrah Chowdhury, regarding a side mission to the Red Palace in Al Jahra, Kuwait, during Operation Desert Sabre:

All right. I keep my promises, so here I am at last. An important thing to remember going into this, though, is that as far as anybody official is concerned, none of this ever happened. They made that all too clear to me afterward, and I never cared to find out what would come next if I pushed that too hard. But your lot can have it, for all the good it'll do you.

I drove a Challenger for the 1st Armoured Division in Operation Desert Storm -- Operation Desert Sabre, if you want to be specific about it, since tanks generally do better on the ground than in the air. I know you wouldn't think it to look at me now, but I was closeted as all hell in those days, playing the butch army boy to the hilt even when I was throwing up about it outside camp most every morning. Still, though, I'd signed up for service, and that was the only way to do it back then. It was another eight years or so before anybody broke through that wall, as far as I know, and even then, I can't imagine being on the vanguard was comfortable at all.

Anyway. When most people think of British tanks in Desert Storm, they think of the Battle of Norfolk, but my crew never even got that far. We were almost, but not quite, to the centre of the conflict when all of this happened; our regiment was still passing through the desert, maybe twenty miles north-west of Al Jahra. It had been only an hour or so we'd been on the move for the day, taking advantage of the last dark before dawn, but everyone was keen for it, from what I saw. We'd just gone wreaking havoc from one Iraqi base to the next, all the way, and that cramped little coffin of a tank didn't seem big enough for all our high spirits. I used to think sometimes in private that the worst part of combat was actually when we were winning, when things seemed easy. When it was all close calls and fear you were relieved just to get out alive, and that was all you wanted -- but when it went really well, when it started to feel _good_ , it got your blood up and pumping, got you salivating. Made you start wanting more just for its own sake. I never liked that feeling, in myself or anyone else. It scared me, if I'm honest.

We were bringing up the rear of the formation, following the tamped-down tracks all the other tanks had already left on the dunes. When we'd just crested a rise, though, Fillmore -- our commander -- spotted a crashed vehicle a ways off, with what looked like a soldier waving a makeshift flag out of it for aid. He radioed it in, and given how well things had been going, it was no great surprise we got permission to break formation and check it out. I won't pretend it wasn't over a bit of groaning from the rest of the crew, but we knew Fillmore was right, of course. He was always a decent sort, as soldiers went.

Brown was ready to have a gun aimed at the poor sod as soon as we stopped, but Fillmore told him not to be a twat. The terrified, flailing man in the crashed truck wasn't one of ours, that much was plain even in the dim of the early morning, but he didn't look like any Iraqi either -- and they'd been surrendering quick enough anyway. I couldn't have said who he was when we first climbed out and I got a look at him; he was in camo too, the whole coalition was, but it was a different pattern and there was a red sort of a harness over his shoulder. Not like I knew my international uniforms; I was just a kid fresh off a council estate in Newham, barely out of school and barely in it in the first place. Keeping a Challenger going in a straight line was still about all I was any good at.

When we helped him out of the wreck, though, in between thanking us madly for stopping, he said he was with the Egyptian mechanized division. A grenadier, name of Qadir Mahmoud, and he'd just come from Al Jahra. Something terrible had happened there, or was going to happen, or both; it was hard to tell, his English was good but he was worked up and tripping over himself, forgetting half the words for what he wanted to say. None of us quite knew how to react, either, and we all just stood round gawping at each other while he tried to explain, which did nothing to calm him down.

Finally, with some back and forth, we were able to sort out at least the basics: perhaps a dozen of the U.S. Marines who'd been cutting a swath up through Kuwait City seemed to have gone mad. They'd deserted from their divisions and roared west into Al Jahra stripped to the waist and soaked in blood, all guns and rolling eyes and grinning red teeth. The local Kuwaitis were battened down as best they could do already, but Qadir told us things they'd done to the few Iraqis in the town who'd tried to surrender that made me sick, and that I won't repeat here. Some of the men in his unit had actually tried to stop them, he said, and the Marines had killed them -- and he wouldn't even tell us the details about that, and looked like he could barely stand to think of it.

The pack of them had torn through the streets like wild dogs, anyway. In the end they'd wound up, for whatever reason, breaking through the gates of the Red Palace, an old fort and historic site near the north edge of the town. They had disappeared inside, and not come out; and while they were occupied with whatever they were doing there, Qadir had seized his chance to run for help. And apparently crashed his ill-gotten truck in the process -- though in the silence that followed his story, I don't think any of us were faulting him for that.

Finally Fillmore said we needed to radio command again and report on the situation. He got on the comms back in the tank while the rest of us looked after Qadir, and got him a cup of tea from the BV. I hadn't missed the fact Qadir was a very handsome man, and the way he smiled at me when he thanked me did set my heart fluttering a little, though by all logic that was just another layer of trouble I didn't need at the moment.

Before I could embarrass myself much, though, Fillmore came back, and he seemed troubled. All he'd say was that command wanted us to go to Al Jahra, with a small detachment of other tanks from the division, and capture the deserters. And if they couldn't be taken in alive, well... blasting the shit out of a Kuwaiti historical landmark with a tank gun wasn't an ideal solution, but it would apparently have to serve as a last resort.

Which was mad, of course, and I could see why he wasn't pleased about it. A band of rogue Marines should be the Americans' problem, not ours, and I couldn't much see how they'd be keen on us solving it for them, come to that. I would've thought at most they'd let the nearest American command centre know what was going on, and let them deal with it. At the best, though, we were being asked to step on some toes and put ourselves in harm's way, and at worst we were gonna get in outright combat with our ostensible allies and cause multiple international incidents all in one day. None of it made any sense, but though he wasn't the officious cock some of your tank commanders could be about orders, Fillmore just shook his head to whatever we asked and said that was the mission, there was no argument about it. He did admit, though, finally, that even the response itself had been... odd. What sounded like some interference in the signal, he said; and although he seemed like he was frowning a bit too deep for just that, we'd all pushed our luck much too far by then already.

In the end, we got back in the tank as our backup was steering around back toward us from the main regiment, and with nothing else really to do, we brought Qadir inside with us. It was a fucking tight fit, I don't mind telling you, you're on top of each other even with a regular four-man crew and nobody exactly planned for extra passengers. He wound up just having to hunker awkwardly by my seat while I drove, pressing in tight to the console to try to keep out of everybody else's way. While I couldn't say I exactly minded having him pressed up against my thigh and shoulder, the distraction factor wasn't a big help, especially with so much going through my mind already.

At least it took us less than an hour to get back to Al Jahra, with just a handful of tanks going at our top speeds on-road and off. It was a small town, especially back in those days, and eerily silent in the early morning, with the roads almost empty and Iraqi military equipment from the occupation abandoned under the rising sun. It felt wrong to be driving a small herd of tanks up the main road from the highway, and rolling them into the open lot in front of the Red Palace. There was nothing to see once we were there, though: the exterior of the compound was just as silent as the roads had been. If it hadn't been for dark brown smears of what looked like blood on the paving just outside, and the rattle of Qadir's shaky breathing beside me, I might've thought nothing had ever happened there at all.

Nothing happened still after a fair amount of shouting at the front gate, either. Everything just seemed ordinary from the outside, and now we were here the idea of firing into the fort seemed completely absurd, it was so big and sprawling. It'd be like shooting fish in the ocean. I think even Fillmore was starting to get impatient at this point, and finally he said, to us and over the comms, that we were gonna get out and just go inside on foot, even though that hadn't been quite what our orders had said. Qadir started trying to argue with him, pleading with him, but Fillmore didn't listen. There was a weird look in his eyes, looking at that quiet fort, though I didn't think enough of it at the time.

We all strapped up for ground combat and came clambering out of our tanks, filing in through the gates as quietly as we could and with everybody on edge. Qadir came with us, though he didn't have to, following along behind with the sidearm he'd held onto; he told me later he was still hoping to convince Fillmore one way or another, honestly, though he couldn't quite work up the nerve to try once surrounded by British soldiers.

The cannons and guns bristling out around the fort entrance looked old enough to be antiques, probably not worth much even if somebody could fire them from inside -- but it was still a bit nerve-wracking to have them at the edge of your vision, all the same. The walls were a kind of pale, smooth mud, which made them look weirdly organic to me, like we were going into some animal's burrow but it drove straight through tan rock. There was nothing in the long, dark halls inside the outer wall, either, though I found myself jumping at every slightest noise. The big dusty courtyard, with its blocky fountain sat at the middle, was the same. The quieter it was as we went deeper, the creepier it was. It felt like any second one of the Americans was going to pop out of somewhere with a knife or a machine gun, gibbering and bloody, but every second they didn't just made it worse.

All told, there were enough of us in the group that we could split off into three once we'd got that far: one going to each of the major buildings in the compound. Our crew, with a couple of others and with Qadir tailing us, went into what I only found out later was the actual palace the place was named for, before it had needed to become a military fort as well. It must have been grand once, and I hear it's been restored since, but when we were there it was mostly dust, shadows, rubble, and some haphazard storage. The rooms seemed very close, and it was hard to see much past yourself. We stuck close, making our way through in a line, everybody's breathing very loud in the ears of the man in front.

At first, when I started to hear the rhythmic slapping sounds off in the dark, I didn't recognise it for something else, something different. I just thought it was the echo of our footsteps, wasn't really aware of noticing it at all. But it grew louder, and closer, and more irregular. And I knew when everybody else did -- when the enormity of the thing climbed and twitched and rolled over the nearest set of rotting crates, pouring down the side of it like an avalanche down a mountain -- that finally, we weren't alone.

What came at us over those boxes was not human. I never for a second want to give that impression. Humanity was just the stuff that made it up. It was a long, lumpy roil of flesh and weaponry and tatters of uniform: not a dozen men but hundreds, maybe more, all fused into one horrible bulging mass. Torsos running into each other, some with arms buried in someone else's side and some sticking out to brandish guns or bayonets. Some men's heads thrust out of the thing's grotesque body, their eyes glaring and rolling and mad, but some were stuck into the middle of it, half-buried in skin. Legs popped out here and there, but for the most part the thing moved itself like a snake, with a muscular flexing and weaving, just pushing with the legs as an afterthought. The Marines were clearly in there: they were piled on nearest the front, and looked a bit more whole than some of the other bodies further back, which seemed to have merged together so deeply they were just suggestions of themselves. I could identify the Marines' uniforms, but there were others in there I didn't recognise -- and still others I did, though it was insane for them to be there. They were British uniforms from around the first World War, tattered and bloodier and mustier than what I'd seen in museums but still unmistakably what they were. All pushed together into one nauseatingly flexible, endlessly long _thing_ that was now slapping its hands and feet and flesh along the crates and floor toward us.

In the time since, I've learned at least a bit about the Kuwait-Najd War in the 1920s, and the Battle of Jahra that was fought at the Red Palace. Barely more than a thousand Kuwaiti soldiers holding the last line against wave after wave of the Ikhwan against the gates. Allies arrived to help in the nick of time, and they were able to turn away the attack, but the threat of more was still very much there -- until the Sheikh called in help from the British military. They came in with planes and ships and guns blazing, of course, and that more or less put an end to things for the time being. Swooping in no doubt thinking they were saving the day, and high on the idea of virtuous victory for the sake of Kuwait, just like now.

And apparently some of them had liked it so much they'd stayed, like poison, in the palace's veins. Called in to defend the martyrs, even when they were only ghosts.

Some of the men with us somehow had the sense in their heads to fire their weapons, for all the good it did. The bullets just seemed to punch and plunge into the mass of the thing and end there, absorbed like rain into dry earth. I wasn't one of the ones shooting, though; I could only stand there, staring at it. Terrified, trying to sort it into any sense in my mind, and...

_Drawn_ to it. I don't know how else to explain it. There was something about that thing, as much as even looking at it made me ill and my vision dark around the edges, that... _called_ to me. I could see myself dropping my own gun, just walking around the others firing at it, and going to it. Pressing myself up to it. Sinking in, and becoming one. It would feel good, some part of me knew, somehow. There would be no more thought, no singleness, no identity. We would be strong, together, stronger than anything, able to rage through anywhere like a righteous fire. We would be on the side of right, and we would be victorious.

Even as that feeling was sweeping through me, I could see that I wasn't the only one. Some of the others who hadn't had the wherewithal to draw their guns had just been holding still as well, and now they began to walk forward: haltingly at first, some of them, and some with utter confidence. They went toward the thing, over Fillmore's increasingly panicked shouts and orders at them, and it bulged and surged toward them, meeting them on their way. It _absorbed_ them, whole. The man who got there first seemed to stick where he touched, and then to push deeper, to where part of him just sank into the side of the thing and was drawn in. And then he was fixed there, his eyes blanking, his arms and legs twitching uselessly. And when the thing started to pull itself along again, he went with it. Then the same thing happened to the next man. And the next.

One by one, even the ones who were firing were starting to let their guns drop, their faces going still. That want to go to it, to become part of it, started to overcome them. One of them stopped shooting, and then the next, and their weapons sagged down to their sides. Then they started walking forward too.

I might have gone myself. I really might've. But... something had started scratching at me, at my mind, making that pull not as strong as it should have been. Something discordant deep inside me. All those American and British uniforms, all that pulling to charge forward and win like heroes... I found myself thinking of Multan, where my grandparents were born, some thousands of miles east from where I was. I had never been, didn't even know what it looked like, but my grandmother had told me so many stories about growing up there under British rule, and all the scars left on the city from all the wars to conquer it: the destroyed royal citadel, the Bloody Bastion. Nobody's ever loved killing people and then telling them it was for their own good like the British, have they? Unless it's the Americans, but who did they learn it from?

So some part of me resisted the idea of charging in to join that, to become a part of that. No matter how simple and right it might feel. I just kept seeing my grandmother's face in my mind, over and over. Making me pause just long enough to keep me away.

And on top of even that, of course, was how gruelingly familiar the whole idea felt, in a way. Like something I was already sick of. You know: submerging all of myself and who I actually was into a mass of men, and disappearing.

One way or another, even as the others I'd come with were sleepwalking toward the thing, I was able to fight its pull. At least long enough for Qadir to grab me by the arm from behind, and yank at me, shouting to me that we needed to run. The sight of his face, the sound of his voice raised over the breaking crates and horrible fleshy noises of _absorption_ , finally managed to snap me out of my confusion a bit, enough that I could think better. And as soon as I could, together, we were running, with the sounds of the thing's limb-slapping motion echoing behind us.

We managed to get enough of a lead to get around a corner and through a heavy door, which turned out to go to a storeroom with a lot of old furnishings and containers. That was good enough to be going on with, and without having to say a word about it, Qadir and I shoved the door shut and started hauling everything we could find up against it, making a barricade. We'd managed to get it at least a couple layers deep before heavy, thudding bulk began slamming up against the door, rattling all the casements and boxes and jars we'd set up but not quite managing to move them. I pressed myself up against them all the same, trying to hold the whole thing in place as best I could, while Qadir kept running panting to shove over more and shore it all up.

The pounding of the thing trying to get in was earthshaking, rattling my whole head. It couldn't seem to do it, though, and after a while, I started to have a sliver of hope that it wouldn't be able to, that all that rubbish piled in front of the door would hold. Not forever, of course, not if it kept on like that, but maybe long enough for... I didn't know what. Rescue? If the other groups searching the Palace did find what we'd run into, it'd likely just suck them in as sure as our own. How long would it take more reinforcements to arrive, whenever anyone actually noticed we hadn't come back? Would they be able to do anything different?

So it wasn't a _lot_ of hope. But we were alive, for now.

I slumped onto the floor for the moment, exhausted, but Qadir kept pacing around the storeroom, which wasn't that big even with all the clutter shifted to one side. After a while, though, he called me over to show me something, in between slams at the door. Of course he hadn't noticed at the time, but where he'd moved some of the shit out of one corner, it turned out he'd revealed the shape of a hatch in the floor: a big heavy slab of that packed mud and earth, with a thick ring at one end almost completely buried in the dust. No telling where it led to, or if it could possibly be a way out -- seemed like too much to hope for. But it was something that wasn't just cowering in here, and at least it looked too small for that fucking monster to get through, as well.

We both grabbed the ring and hauled it up together, opening a square of darkness. I'd been half scared it'd just be a little cubby in the floor, just enough for a couple more urns or something, but there was actually a set of wooden steps down, disappearing below the floor. Qadir climbed down and then me after him, and with him bracing me I got the trap door shut again. I wasn't in much of a state to notice that his arms wrapped around me felt nice, but a part of me did, all the same.

Once I got my flashlight on, we could see it was a sort of a cellar: bigger than I'd feared, not as big or connected to anything else as I might have hoped. Just a long rectangular space cut under the storeroom, shored up with crude struts and bricks of more mud lining the walls. Qadir was a bit shorter, but I couldn't even stand all the way upright without hitting the ceiling. We could still hear the victory monster slamming itself and scrabbling at the door up above, but it was much more muffled down here, which I'd take for what it was. The air was very dusty, but dry, and still. There was really nothing down there but us.

We went as far from the hatch as we could and sat against the wall, exhausted, our guns out beside us. Nothing for it now: either it would get in, or it wouldn't. Somehow, that came as a sort of a relief.

It got unbearable after a while just to listen to that pounding above us, and finally we started talking. Qadir said, "You didn't go to it," and that was when I was first really sure that he'd felt the same thing the rest of us had -- the same terrible pull toward that thing. I agreed, no, I hadn't, and neither had he clearly, and he laughed a little at that.

"When I was a student, I loved another man," he said. "We tried to keep it secret, but my brother discovered us. My family was ashamed, but if they sent me away or I went to prison, it would be known what I had done, and they were afraid. So I left to join the army, and they could tell others so, and we would all be safe." He looked over at me, with a bitter sort of smile. "I have never known victory as a soldier. To me, it was always the sign of my failure."

He looked like he didn't know what to expect from me after that, and I couldn't blame him. To him it must have seemed like he was risking a lot, telling all that to the person he was trapped in hiding with, and that seemed really brave to me. So I smiled at him as I nodded, and I told him about my grandmother's stories, and the things that had always bothered me. And since he'd been so brave, I reckoned I owed him the same; and when I'd finished I paused a moment and then added, "And I'm also a woman, actually. So I've never felt like it was quite the place for me, either."

It was the first time I'd ever said anything like that out loud, and I was sort of amazed by how it felt: like I'd picked up something so heavy off me that now I could float right off the ground. I didn't have any idea what to expect from Qadir at that, either, and I almost didn't dare look at him. But when I did, he was just smiling back at me, in a soft, kind way. He reached over and touched my hand, very lightly, so if I wanted I could pull away.

"I should have known," he said, with that same sweet smile. "You are very beautiful."

Honestly, as chat-up lines go, it was a bit of a clunker. Especially with me the way I must have looked: in my rumpled dusty fatigues, with maybe an inch of hair on my head, face all smeared with mung from getting down here and my day's worth of beard. Ask me if I cared right then, though. Right then, I felt like if the thing did get in and we died right there, it'd still have been worth it. Just for having, just once, had this kind handsome man hear me say it, and accept it, and tell me he could see me too.

I don't think either of us was really expecting it when we kissed, but we did, and it was much the same: sort of not great, but also absolutely wonderful. We were clumsy and dirty and sweaty and exhausted, and we were twisted around awkwardly against the wall, and his mouth and hands were very gentle. His shoulder was warm against mine. I'd pushed up half on my knees after a bit, and he put his hands on my hips and guided me into his lap, and then I was pressed up to him with my arms around his neck. He touched me like no one had ever touched me, too: delicately and with great care, like I was fragile, like a pretty thing he treasured. His hands stroked over my hips and up under the shirt of my uniform, cupping over my chest, brushing deliberately over my nipples. It made me half afraid I was going to burst into tears against his mouth, and also so turned on I thought I'd fucking die of it. I squirmed up against him and gasped and moaned and whimpered, and if that awful thing was still hammering away trying to get at us, I couldn't even hear it anymore over the blood in my ears.

Qadir got me on my back on the dirt floor of that long underground storeroom, just my trousers off, my legs wrapped around him. Fucking was really out of the question for a number of reasons, but he kissed his way down me and I clung to his arms while he put his mouth on me, and I just let go of everything. I remember thinking as he was so hot and wet all around me, jerking shivers through me all from top to bottom, that it didn't matter what happened next, I didn't care anymore, I wasn't even afraid. There could be a thousand monsters up there, and they could have us, as long as he'd had me first.

I came completely undone in his mouth, and then I sucked him off too, lying across his lap while he stroked what there was of my hair and called me beautiful again, again and again. When he'd finished, arching and gasping into me, we just curled up together, in our hiding place, and held each other. Somehow, for a while, we even slept.

We were down there for a little over two days, in the end. Sometimes we heard the victory monster just above us, hurling itself against the door to try to get in; sometimes it wasn't at the door, but we could hear it moving around the palace instead, its endless heavy body dragging through the halls as its arms and legs hauled it along. We didn't even really speak, most of the time: we just held each other, and kept quiet, and waited. We had no food or water with us to speak of, so we knew we couldn't last forever even if it didn't ever get to us; but at least we each had the other, in our fear.

Then finally, we stopped hearing it at all. It took a while to even register, we just expected so much to hear it at that point, but now there was just... silence. It was the best chance that we were going to get and we knew it, and we staggered up out of the storeroom and out of the palace and out of the whole compound at as close to a blind run as we could still manage, before collapsing in the street outside. We needn't have pushed so hard, though: we saw no sign of the thing, the whole way through. It was just gone, as suddenly as we'd found it, with no reason that we could see why. Although from what I know now, it must have been right around then that the "100-hour war" came to an end.

We were taken to the nearest hospital in Kuwait City, to be treated for dehydration and whatever else happens to you when you sit in a storeroom for fifty hours, I was never entirely clear. I bounced back a bit quicker than Qadir, and made my way whenever I could to his bed, just to sit with him. We talked about everything we could think of that wasn't what had happened to us, which fortunately turned out to be a lot. At one point I summoned up the courage to give him my parents' address in London, which was the most permanent place I had to get mail sent on from, and he gave me his family's address in Cairo in much the same way. He also suggested, with a knowing sort of smile, that if I wanted to write under a name that suited me better, his family might actually be quite relieved to see him receiving letters from a good Muslim woman. That startled me into laughing quite hard, but he joined me before I could feel too badly.

But all the same, the first time I actually called myself Farrah really was signing my first letter to Qadir. I cried after, for quite some time, and I'd never known I could feel like I felt just then.

I quit the army not long after coming home, and took all the shitty little jobs I could trying to save money, while Qadir did the same where he was. After around five years of letters and wild plans, Qadir emigrated, and soon after he had at long last moved in with me. We've been married nearly ten more years now, and he still calls me beautiful every day, the soppy old thing.

I don't know where the thing in the Red Palace went, or what happened to it, and I don't want to know. The whole site has been renovated and is a tourist attraction now, apparently, although I don't mind telling you the idea gives me a shudder. Of course with sightseers and staff tromping round there all day long, there can't very well be an enormous horrible monster made of soldiers lurking in the shadows... but it must have gone _somewhere_. And I don't like to think what might happen, the next time someone starts thinking they're winning righteous victories on behalf of Kuwait.

But there it is anyway, Gertrude. I hope it's some good to you, or at least more than it ever has been to me, apart from the obvious. Whether it is or not, though, I did promise, and it's the least I owe you for Glasgow. A shame I missed you today, I would've liked to say hello, but your assistant said you were very busy, and I suppose I can only imagine. Just be careful out there -- from one tough old bird to another.

And should you find yourself basking in a victory, as I'm sure you sometimes do... have a care about that, all right?

\------

Statement ends.

\------

Martin had got maybe one foot through the cottage door and as far as "I'm ba--" in the greeting he was calling before Jon was on him. He first snatched the bags of groceries from Martin's arms, where he'd been trying to juggle them with working the doorknob (and staggered a bit with their weight, which he hadn't planned on; good _God_ , Martin was strong, and having the reminder of that fact just served to make him move faster), and shoved them unceremoniously whole into the refrigerator. Anything in there that wasn't meant to be cold would be no worse for it. 

Then he turned back on a very wide-eyed Martin still frozen in the act of saying hello, and lunged at him. With no coordination whatsoever, just trusting to Martin to catch him, which Martin did. And after grabbing fistfuls of Martin's jumper to drag his shoulders and head down within range, Jon strained up on his toes, and crushed their mouths together.

Martin still seemed taken aback, to say the least, but he got the idea quickly. After a moment he flailed back behind him with one arm to close the door, but the other wrapped Jon's waist and pressed him close. That brought Jon's straining erection into warm contact with Martin's thigh, of course, even if through the annoyance of both their trousers, and he buried a heartfelt groan in Martin's mouth and ground his hips shamelessly forward. A punched-out little sound shaped like "Oh" parted Martin's mouth wider, loosing the fit of their lips to free the hot panting of Jon's breath and, increasingly, Martin's.

"Okay, hello to you too," Martin had to gasp to say when they slid apart a moment later, and his little laugh was a wheeze. His large, warm hands smoothed over Jon's back as Jon panted and twitched up against him. "Did, ah, you have a nice time while I was out?"

"Read a statement," Jon mumbled, into the side of Martin's jaw. Martin drew back enough to give him a look that was surely warranted, though Jon rolled his eyes anyway. "And part of it was about _sex_ , and apparently that affects me too. I haven't gone _that_ weird yet."

Martin just wrinkled his nose further if possible, all the same, in spite of his breathlessness. "Eugh. Not sure I want to know what statement sex entails."

"That bit was fine, actually," Jon said with a little smile, after a brief pause to consider. "It was honestly sort of -- sweet, as statements go. Had a happy ending, at least."

"Oh yeah?" Martin looked a bit skeptical, but also relieved, as Jon had thought he might. "Did they live happily ever after?"

"As... far as I know, yes." After only another second or two, though, he nosed pointedly at Martin's ear. "Right now, though, I would _very_ much like to focus on the present."

"Sure you don't want to give me a 'Martin, I believe you have some work to be doing," just for old times' sake?" Martin asked cheerfully, dropping his voice in the middle into what Jon considered to be a needlessly unflattering impression. Before he had time to be properly either indignant or sheepish, though, Martin had bent to simply hoist him right off his feet and up against Martin's chest. Which meant quite suddenly he couldn't do anything but wrap his legs around Martin as best he could, and moan embarrassingly loudly.

With not much else to do as they were hiding away in the Scottish countryside and newly together, they'd done some exploring of each other already by this point, feeling out the edges of their respective wants and boundaries. Even so, Jon could still see why Martin had been startled. Sex with Martin was wonderful, actually, a completely different experience from the few frustrating and humiliating attempts of his youth that had made him for so long just avoid the whole thing altogether. It was _Martin_ , and he was gentle and patient and reassuring and practical, and it was lovely and deeply satisfying to drink in every sound and expression along the road to when Martin arched and gasped and came. But this sort of insistent, hot urgency was still not something Jon had ever experienced. It _felt_ strange even now, like a guest to his body that did not quite belong there. It was here for now, though, and honestly it was just sort of exciting to try it out, for its newness as much as for the experience itself. He could feel what it was to be melting apart with longing to be touched now, and then go back to being with Martin as before, without either experience diminishing the other. The Highlands were beautiful and in spite of everything there'd been a kind of peace and even joy to be found here, but that didn't mean he didn't hope they'd someday be able to go home.

They made it only as far as the couch, which was probably for the best for both Martin's back and Jon's almost painfully hard prick. He'd never been a very good boss, it was true, but Jon could at least direct Martin to settle so that Martin's back was propped against the arm of the couch and his legs stretched out along the cushions. As ratty and secondhand as it was, it was also mercifully deep, meaning that not only did Martin fit well enough lengthwise, Jon had space to kneel astride him. He braced himself against Martin's chest with one hand and used the other to unfasten his own trousers.

With the blood in his head pounding like this, he could absolutely understand the draw the statement had described, that tense gravity that prized unity above all other states. A real, sharp part of him even wanted to sink impossibly into Martin, until he forgot where one of them ended and the other began. He settled for shoving aside the elastic waistband of his underpants and freeing his insistent erection.

Martin licked his lips as he looked up at Jon, eyes wide. "Do you ... can I touch you?" he asked.

" _Yes_ ," Jon gasped. Bless Martin for wanting permission, but Jon was far past that point. There was a hunger in him that made his heart hammer against his ribs.

Martin reached for Jon's prick and wrapped those strong fingers around his shaft. The touch made Jon exhale loudly; Martin's hand was so warm, even so recently come in from walking a mile in the cold and carrying groceries all the way. Jon went straight for the fly of Martin's corduroys, easing the buttons from the soft fabric until he there was nothing between his hand and Martin's prick but the thin cloth of Martin's underwear.

Martin's size was something Jon loved in every aspect, but there was something so solidly satisfying in particular about the thickness of Martin's cock. It was as sturdy as the rest of him, though at the moment not nearly as soft. Jon pressed the heel of his hand against it and was gratified by the low, groaning reaction that earned him. Martin squeezed Jon's shaft in return.

Jon reached for the hem of Martin's hoodie, then grabbed it and the t-shirt beneath, pulling them upwards. After only a moment's hesitation, Martin allowed it, letting go of Jon and lifting his arms so that Jon could strip him to the waist, but once he was shirtless, he drew his arms self-consciously back to himself.

"What?" Jon asked with a smile, putting his hand square in the middle of Martin's chest. "I like to see you."

Martin's cheeks pinkened the way they always did when Jon's compliments hit their intended targets. "Not much to look at," Martin muttered, letting his gaze fall away despite keeping up a brave smile.

"You are to me," Jon said, leaning in for another deep, sweet kiss. He broke it only to strip himself to the waist, chucking off his baggy sweatshirt so that they could be next to one another, skin to skin. The poorly insulated cottage was a bit chilly, making Martin feel even warmer by contrast.

With a little coordination, Jon worked Martin's erection out through the slit in the front of his pants. A thought struck him then -- something he'd never tried before, but then again, there was no time like the present for closeness. He scooted down Martin's body just slightly so that he could press his own cock right up against Martin's. He couldn't wrap his hand all the way around both of them together like that, but he could catch them both in a sturdy grip. With both their pricks encircled in his fingers, Jon began to move his hips and build a slow, rhythmic friction.

Martin made a soft gasping sound and grabbed for Jon, getting one of his hands into Jon's hair. His grip tugged the strands free of the loose knot Jon had gathered them in, spilling a few long, dark locks around his face. There was something invigorating about that gesture, something pleasantly wild about being set free, even if only in such a mundane way. Jon leaned in for another kiss, this one seasoned with the slightest brush of Jon's teeth. He was pleased to feel the way their graze made Martin's prick jump in his hand. In a way, being able to win that response was its own little victory.

The position was a bit awkward, the way Jon had to spread his knees and arch his back to touch Martin as much as he wanted while still having enough leverage to jerk them both off. Once his hand even slipped, and he wound up backhanding Martin right across his belly, which lost Martin for a minute in a fit of surprised giggles. Jon, who'd been readying to apologise immediately for breaking the illusion that he was a flawless and talented sex-haver, found himself relieved as he started laughing too. That was something that the need that gripped him could not erase -- the fact that it was Martin here beneath him, touching him, hard for him. Martin, who understood perhaps better than anyone what an absolute disaster Jon was, and cared for him anyway. Being clumsy couldn't mess that up. If anything, it was a fine reminder of how real it finally was.

Jon reached his climax before Martin did, which he supposed likely surprised them both in equal measure. After all, sex between them had been focused mostly on getting Martin off, with Jon's orgasm a secondary and not-always-necessary component. It wasn't that he wasn't aroused by Martin's touch, or that he didn't _want_ to come. Jon had simply, over the course of his adult life, come to think of that particular function of his body as on the whole more trouble than it was worth. At the very least, it was generally a time investment.

Whatever the statement had started in him, however, burned through all that resistance. He gasped and buried his face in the crook of Martin's neck as he came all over Martin's stomach and chest. He was glad their only neighbours were cows, because he was certain the noises he was making were beyond impolite. That didn't matter now, though; what mattered now was that Martin had him, and Martin wanted him, and that alone made it all right.

"Christ, Jon," Martin gasped in his ear, high and taut and broken, as if to make that point. He sounded not far off from following at all. Still shivering with the aftermath, but starting to be a bit oversensitive, Jon just shifted his hips backward as best he could without changing their position too much, and gave Martin all of his hand. This was no time for teasing and his strokes were firm and urgent, foreskin shifting with his grip. At the same time, he rolled his head toward Martin's shoulder, lifting it so he could watch Martin's face in this last moment. Martin's brow tensed and smoothed, and his lips were parted and trembling, his freckles almost lost amid the deep pink stain of his flush. He was very beautiful, and deserved to know it, but Jon also thought it might be an unwelcome distraction right in this moment to be told about how he looked. He would tell Martin later. Every day, for as long as he had the chance.

Then Martin hitched and shuddered and heaved under him, and curled his head and shoulders in toward Jon as he came. He half-buried his cry in Jon's hair, but it was still pleasingly loud in Jon's ears, the wavering crack in his voice making Jon shiver a little with contentment and a lazy curling after-thread of heat low in his belly. Martin's cock jumped and pulsed in Jon's hand, his come adding itself to Jon's up his belly. While the final state of that mess was a bit disgusting, it was weirdly viscerally satisfying, too. The two of them mingled together, in this small way, in the middle of the wreck he'd so effectively made of Martin.

They lay collapsed together like that for a moment: half-naked, breathing, sticky with sweat and come, hopelessly tangled. With his eyes still closed, Martin eventually lifted a hand to stroke Jon's hair with the greatest of tenderness, and a little smile spread warmly across his lips. It was very quiet in the cottage now, and safe. There was nothing and nowhere that could be better.

Finally, though, Jon had to concede to himself that his thigh was getting a cramp and all the semen streaked up Martin's body simply could not be allowed to keep congealing there. With a small disgruntled noise, he managed to push himself up to a kind of clumsy sitting position. Martin winced harder than Jon did himself at the crack his back made, before opening his eyes to smile up at Jon with a knowing, unguarded fondness Jon was still entirely unconvinced he deserved.

"I think that brings the total up to one statement that I like," Martin said at last, rubbing an affectionate hand along Jon's knee where he could reach it. "So, congratulations to it, I guess?"

Jon laughed under his breath, and reached down to squeeze Martin's hand. "I should add that to the file. 'Supplemental note: only statement ever to be liked by Martin Blackwood.'"

"Mm. Put a little gold star on it, maybe." Martin smothered a yawn in his hand, then looked back at Jon with new closeness. "Are you feeling all right? It didn't, like... do anything else to you?"

"No, not at all," Jon said, waving his hand. "Just a bit of -- ah, borrowed excitement, as it were. I'm fine."

"Well, I'm not complaining, then." Martin pushed up on his elbows a bit and glanced down at himself, then back up at Jon with his smile returned. "D'you want to go see if we can both actually fit in the shower?"

Jon considered that; Martin had a point, he'd by no means consider it a given that they could. "I'm very interested to find out," he said, smiling as he nodded, and Martin snorted a bit but also started pushing up further. Jon stood up in aid of the process, in spite of his complaining knees, and even took both Martin's hands to help him up off the couch -- although he had the distinct impression when Martin got up that he was doing it entirely on his own, and just kind enough to let Jon pretend to be of assistance.

Well, no matter. They were upright and starting to move toward the cottage's tiny toilet in short order -- and then Jon stopped, and turned back to Martin, looking up at him with their hands linked and chests close and both of them an absolute disaster.

"I think you're beautiful," Jon said, seriously, because even if it was a bit out of nowhere right now, he _had_ promised himself. And then, even while Martin was pinkening wildly again at that, because it was the closest he thought he could come to getting out everything that had been teeming in his head, bottlenecked there, throughout: "And I love you."

Martin laughed, though so helplessly and happily there was no possibility of being offended. "I love you too," he said when he could manage, with a smile at Jon that made the bright autumn sun outside look like a rank amateur by comparison. "Even if you're completely out of your mind. I'm just glad it works in my favour."

Jon craned up, rather than dignify that with a response, and Martin leaned down to him, and they kissed with slow lingering softness now, and none of the urgency of before. But that was all right, and it would be all right too if the shower were too tight a squeeze for two and Jon had to wait sat on the tile floor, nattering to Martin about something or other while he washed himself up, and take a turn after that might run out of hot water. There was even the possibility -- slim but not nonexistent -- that whatever happened next, whatever bigger and more terrifying thing might come after all of this quiet breath-holding, might also be all right, in the end. Somehow. At least for a while.

And no matter what it was, if nothing else, they would go to it together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Statement CWs:  
> -brief discussion of a closeted trans character's dysphoria  
> -military/war  
> -some Actual History although the fictional horror itself is only very metaphorically related to it  
> -body horror  
> -some heavy stuff about colonialism and white saviorism  
> -brief discussion of cultural/internalized homophobia  
> -sex in a life-or-death situation
> 
> Post-statement CWs:  
> -very brief body issues?  
> -mostly this is just Extremely Soft so
> 
> ALSO THEN FARRAH AND QADIR WERE FINE FOREVER BECAUSE I SAID SO


End file.
